The increasing emphasis on mass customization, shortened product lifecycles, synchronized supply chains, when coupled with advances in information system, is driving most firms towards make-to-order (MTO) operations. Increasing global competition, lower profit margins, and higher customer...

This paper aims to minimise the makespan of a set of identical batch processing machines in parallel. The batch processing machine can process a batch of jobs as long as the total size of all the jobs in the batch does not exceed its capacity. The processing time of the job and its size are...

Parallel processing is prevalent in many manufacturing and service systems (i.e. some components may have to wait for other components before the assembly can begin). It is also common to observe manufacturing systems that deal with multiple products, resources shared between different products,...