Scheduling with Restricted Machine Availability Using Cloud Computing

The production scheduling with restricted machine availability problem is known to be NP-Hard problem since the time complexity increase exponentially with the required number of jobs increasing. This fact enforces researchers to find approximate solutions for these problems by heuristics and meta-heurisics. Another state-of-the-art solution methodology which may help solving the problem exactly and saves time is the cloud computing. By using parallel computing via cloud we solved larger problems exactly than those solved by total enumeration. The results showed that by using parallel computing via cloud and by adding more workers (represented here as processing cores) the problem solution speed up could be gained and problems with more number of jobs could be solved exactly by the proposed total enumeration algorithm. Cloud computing could be the next generation in the field of solving optimization techniques exactly.