On the Scheduling of Jobs on a Number of Identical Machines.

Abstract : Several theoretical results are developed to obtain an efficient branch-and-bound algorithm for the sequencing problem when all jobs are available to process at time zero and are independent (i.e., there are no precedence relationships among jobs). The branch-and-bound algorithm and its computational results are given for the case of linear penalty functions. The computational experiences are very encouraging. The computer times required to solve the problems are very short and most problems become optimal at the early stages of computation. (Author)