Parallel branch-and-price algorithms for the single machine total weighted tardiness scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times

Scheduling problems occur in a broad range of real-world application fields and have attracted a huge set of research articles. However, there is only little research on exact algorithms for scheduling problems, many of which are NP-hard in the strong sense. We investigate the problem on a single machine with a total weighted tardiness objective function and sequence-dependent setup times. First, we adopt a serial branch-and-price algorithm from the literature and present a modified branching strategy and a primal heuristic. Second, we use the potential of parallel computing architectures by presenting two parallel versions of the branch-and-price algorithm. Third, we conduct extensive computational experiments to show that our parallelization approaches provide substantial parallel speedups on well-known benchmark instances from the literature. We further observe that the parallel speedups achieved by our parallel algorithms are very robust among all tested instances.