Abstract

This paper presents a look-ahead constructive heuristic for solving the unrelated parallel machine problem with sequence dependent setup times, where the objective is to minimize the completion time of the last job, or makespan (C max)- This is an NP-hard problem. Although a variety of practical situations can be modeled using this problem, still a modest number of articles devoted to it can be found in literature. The constructive heuristic proposed in this paper has a look-ahead mechanism based on a saving criterion, which permits to improve the quality of solutions against another constructive heuristic rule already reported in literature.