A set of n nonpreemptive tasks are to be scheduled on m parallel dedicated machines with a regular criterion. Chain precedence constraints among the tasks, deterministic processing times and processing machine of each task are given.

This study proposes an efficient exact algorithm for the precedence-constrained single-machine scheduling problem to minimize total job completion cost where machine idle time is forbidden. The proposed algorithm is based on the SSDP (Successive Sublimation Dynamic Programming) method and is an...