A single machine scheduling problem with two-dimensional vector packing constraints

We consider a scheduling problem where jobs consume a perishable resource stored in vials. It leads to a new scheduling problem, with two-dimensional jobs, one dimension for the duration and one dimension for the consumption. Jobs have to be finished before a given due date, and the objective is to schedule the jobs on a single machine so that the maximum lateness does not exceed a given threshold and the number of vials required for processing all the jobs is minimized. We propose a two-step approach embedding a Recovering Beam Search algorithm to get a good-quality initial solution reachable in short time and a more time consuming matheuristic algorithm. Computational experiments are performed on the benchmark instances available for the two-dimensional vector packing problem integrated with additional due dates to take into account the maximum lateness constraints. The computational results show very good performances of the proposed approach that remains effective also on the original two-dimensional vector packing instances without due dates where 7 new bounds are obtained. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.