Minimizing workload balancing criteria on identical parallel machines

Abstract

This paper considers the problem of scheduling nonpreemptive jobs on identical parallel processors to minimize workload balancing criteria. While workload balancing is an important practical criterion given the need of production systems to efficiently use all of their resources, there is no established measure of performance in the scheduling literature that characterizes total workload balance. In this paper, the normalized standard deviation, the normalized mean deviation, and the normalized mean difference are proposed as criteria that measure the balance of the workloads among the machines associated to a schedule. A local search algorithm, which performs multiple exchanges of jobs among machines, is presented. The results of a wide computational experimentation demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs well for all the proposed measures.

Generating balanced workload allocations in hospitals

“…Efficient algorithms for these problems and some of their special cases have been developed by Cossari et al (2012); Schwerdfeger and Walter (2016); Christ et al (2019). Other equity functions that have been proposed include the relative percentage of imbalance (which is equivalent to minimizing C max ) (Rajakumar et al, 2004) and normalized mean difference (Cossari et al, 2013).…”

Robust Optimization on Unrelated Parallel Machine Scheduling with Setup Times

“…These two operators are simple and flexible, and have been used in many problems with similar settings such as the workload balancing problem on parallel machine [34,35], the task allocation problem [36], and the parallel machine scheduling problem [37,26]. We use these two operators to search the neighborhood of the incumbent solution sequentially.…”

Workload Balancing on Identical Parallel Machines: Theoretical and Computational Analysis

“…Cossari et al [10] noted that there is no established performance measure in the literature to characterize the workload balancing problem. However, different criteria have been proposed in the literature.…”

“…More specifically, it aims to investigate the theoretical relationships between P||C max , P||NSSWD and P||C ∆ problems. As mentioned by Cossari et al [10], while workload balancing is an important practical criterion given the need of production systems to efficiently use all of their resources, there is no established measure of performance in the scheduling literature that characterizes total workload balance. Different criteria have been addressed in the literature and some of them are trivial.…”