An Empirical Evaluation of the “Entrapment” Procedure for Scheduling Jobs on Identical Machines

Abstract This work empirically evaluates the “entrapment” procedure used by Barnes and Brennan's branch-and-bound algorithm to minimize total cost of tardy jobs to be processed on identical machines. Using 25 problems taken from various known sources, it is shown that entrapment does not necessarily decrease computational time required to optimally solve such a problem.