A branch and bound algorithm to minimize total weighted completion time on identical parallel machines with job release dates

In this paper, we consider an identical parallel machine scheduling problem with release dates. The objective is to minimize the total weighted completion time. This problem is know to be strongly NP-hard. We propose two lower bounds. We present an efficient heuristic, we also propose some dominance properties. A branch and bound algorithm in which the heuristic, the lower bounds and the dominance properties are incorporated is proposed and tested on a large set of randomly generated instances

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