A meta-heuristic to minimize makespan for parallel batch machines with arbitrary job sizes

We consider the problem of scheduling a set of n jobs with arbitrary job sizes on a set of m identical and parallel batch machines so as to minimize the makespan. Motivated by the computational complexity of the problem, we propose a meta-heuristic based on the max–min ant system method. Computational experiments are performed with randomly generated test data. The results show that our algorithm outperforms several of the previously studied algorithms.