Energetic reasoning revisited: application to parallel machine scheduling

Abstract

We consider the problem of minimizing makespan on identical parallel machines subject to release dates and delivery times. We present several new feasibility tests and adjustment techniques that consistently improve theclassical energetic reasoning approach. Computational results carried out on a set of hard instances provide strong evidence that the performance of a state-of-the-art exact branch-and-bound algorithm is substantially improved through embedding the proposed enhanced energetic reasoning.