Unrelated parallel machines with precedence constraints: application to cloud computing

Motivated by some cloud computing applications, this paper considers an unrelated parallel-machine scheduling problem under precedence constraints. We mainly propose an efficient genetic algorithm based on a permutation coding. The performances of the proposed algorithm have been compared to an existing greedy search method and to an exact formulation based on a basic integer linear programming. The obtained results confirm the efficiency of the proposed method and its ability to improve the initial solutions of the considered problem.