Family-based dispatching with parallel machines

Family-based dispatching heuristics seek to lower set-up frequencies by grouping similar types of jobs for joint processing. Hence, job flow times may be improved as less time is spent on set-ups. So far, family-based dispatching with parallel machines received little attention in literature. We address the perceived gap by proposing extensions to existing family-based dispatching heuristics. Main extensions concern improved rules for family priority settings and for coordinating the number of machines in use by a single family. Extended heuristics are tested by an extensive simulation study. Significant performance gains for extended heuristics vs. existing heuristics are found. Performance gains are largest for high set-up to run-time ratios.