Resource-constrained scheduling of unrelated parallel machines with release times and setup times

This article studies an unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem that considers job release times and setup times. The objective is to minimize the makespan subject to a given resource consumption constraint. For this problem, a mathematical model is established for small-sized problems, and a Modified Adaptive Large Neighbourhood Search (MALNS) algorithm is used to solve large-sized problems. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, it is compared with three other advanced algorithms and a mathematical model. Each algorithm is run five times, and both the average and best results are recorded. The experimental results show that, for small-sized problems, the MALNS algorithm achieves the average result equal to the optimal result for 93.333% of the 480 instances, while the other three algorithms achieve 91.458%, 62.500% and 43.958%, respectively. For large-sized problems, MALNS provides the best result for all 960 cases, which is far superior to its competitors.