A heuristic for parallel machine scheduling with machine preference for the electroetching of aluminium foil

This paper considers a scheduling problem in the manufacturing of anodic electroetching aluminum foil. To reduce cost and increase efficiency, the manufacturer of aluminum foil usually designs the equipment for electroetching of aluminum foil into specialized equipment that is dedicated to produce high voltage or medium voltage aluminum foil based on the range the aluminum foil can bear. Nevertheless, high voltage equipment can be used to produce medium voltage aluminum foil with longer processing time, and vice versa. The problem is to schedule jobs on the high and medium voltage equipment, each having several pieces in parallel, with setup times to minimize to the total completion time. In this paper, we propose a three-stage heuristic for this problem and computationally evaluate the performance of the heuristic relative to the solution obtained using a branch-and-bound algorithm.