Abstract
Scheduling problems form an important class of decision-making problems where two types of decision have to be taken: allocation and sequencing. Scheduling is primarily considered with resource allocation; sequencing, however, is concerned with the order of jobs to be performed on the allocated resource (Sipper and Bulfin [8]). This paper proposes the use of a new heuristic called ABURAS, which is designed to minimize the makespan of an unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem. To evaluate the performance of the suggested heuristic, a real scheduling problem involving roof truss manufacturing at a major housing construction company is investigated. The ABURAS heuristic shows superiority in terms of reduced makespan over originally developed heuristics..