Cyclic scheduling of perishable products in parallel machine with release dates, due dates and deadlines

This paper deals with a realistic cyclic scheduling problem in the food industry environment in which parallel machines are considered to process perishable jobs with given release dates, due dates and deadlines. Jobs are subject to post-production shelf life limitation and must be delivered to retailers during the corresponding time window bounded by due dates and deadlines. Both early and tardy jobs are penalized by partial weighted earliness/tardiness functions and the overall problem is to provide a cyclic schedule of minimum cost. A mixed integer programming model is proposed and a heuristic solution beside an iterated greedy algorithm is developed to generate good and feasible solutions for the problem. The proposed MIP, heuristic and iterated greedy produce a series of solutions covering a wide range of cases from slow optimal solutions to quick and approximated schedules.