ABSTRACT
Scheduling can be described as the allocation of available resources over time to meet the performance criteria defined in a domain. Scheduling aims at a proper allocation of resources to tasks to minimize cost and maximize profit. Scheduling plays a crucial role not only in the efficiency of operating the system, but also in customer satisfaction. Static and dynamic scheduling problems are classified by the nature of job arrivals. In dynamic scheduling problems, the shop is a continuous process. Parallel machine scheduling is used to schedule jobs processed on a series of same function machines in order to achieve certain objective functions. Among them, scheduling is a critical function for the control and operation of any flexible manufacturing system. The complexity usually grows exponentially with the number of machines, making the problem intractable. This problem, like all deterministic scheduling problems, belongs to the wide class of combinatorial optimization problems, many of which are known to be NP-hard.
