Exponential neighborhood search for a parallel machine scheduling problem

We consider the parallel machine scheduling problem where jobs have different earliness-tardiness penalties and a restrictive common due date. This problem is NP-hard in the strong sense. In this paper we define an exponential size neighborhood for this problem and prove that finding the local minimum in it is an NP-hard problem. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a pseudo-polynomial algorithm that finds the best solution of the exponential neighborhood. Additionally, we present some computational results.