On the exact solution of a large class of parallel machine scheduling problems

International audienceThis work deals with a very generic class of scheduling problems with identical/uniform/unrelated parallel machine environment. It considers well-known attributes such as release dates or sequence-dependent setup times and accepts any objective function defined over job completion times. Non-regular objectives are also supported. We introduce a branch-cut-and-price algorithm for such problems that makes use of non-robust cuts, i.e., cuts which change the structure of the pricing problem. This is the first time that such cuts are employed for machine scheduling problems. The algorithm also embeds other important techniques such as strong branching, reduced cost fixing and dual stabilization. Computational experiments over literature benchmarks showed that the proposed algorithm is indeed effective and could solve many instances to optimality for the first time