A tabu search algorithm for scheduling pharmaceutical packaging operations

This paper addresses a practical scheduling problem arising in the packaging department of a pharmaceutical industrial plant. The problem is modeled as a parallel machine scheduling problem with setups, release and due dates and additional constraints related to the scarce availability of tools and human operators. The objective functions are minimization of makespan and maximum tardiness in lexicographic order. Representing a solution with a directed graph allows us to devise an effective tabu search algorithm to solve the problem. Computational experiments, carried on real and randomly generated instances, show the effectiveness of this approach. Keywords—scheduling, packaging, tabu search, pharmaceutical industry.