摘要：This paper investigates the scheduling problem of minimizing makespan on parallel batch processing machines encountered in different manufacturing environments, such as the burn-in operation in the manufacture of semiconductors and the aging test operation in the manufacture of thin film transistor-liquid crystal displays (TFT-LCDs). Each job is characterized by a processing time, a release time and a job size. Each machine can process multiple jobs simultaneously in a batch, as long as the total size of all jobs in the batch does not exceed machine capacity. The processing time of a batch is represented by the longest time among the jobs in the batch. An approximation algorithm with worst-case ratio 2+\epsilon is presented, where \epsilon > 0 can be made arbitrarily small.
