This paper studies a complex variation of the parallel machine scheduling (PMS) problem, as encountered at a Belgian producer of knitted fabrics. The aim is to assign N J jobs to N M unrelated parallel machines, minimising a weighted combination of job lateness and tardiness. Jobs are assigned specific release, and due dates and changeover times are sequence dependent. Current literature is extended by including geographically dispersed production locations, which influence job due dates and objective function coefficients. Furthermore, the changeover interference due to limited availability of technicians is also studied in this paper. The scheduling problem is solved using a hybrid meta-heuristic, which combines elements from simulated annealing and genetic algorithms. This hybrid meta-heuristic is capable of solving real-scale scheduling problems of up to 750 jobs, 75 machines and 10 production locations within reasonable computation time. This hybrid scheduling procedure is extended with heuristic dispatching rules capable of reducing the impact of changeover interference by 23% on average compared to the random scenario, for the case where a single technician is expected to serve up to 12 machines.

In hospitals, the operating room (OR) is a particularly expensive facility and thus efficient scheduling is imperative. This can be greatly supported by using advanced methods that are discussed in the academic literature. In order to help researchers and practitioners to select new relevant articles, we classify the recent OR planning and scheduling literature into tables regarding patient type, used performance measures, decisions made, OR up- and downstream facilities, uncertainty, research methodology and testing phase. Based on these classifications, we identify trends and promising topics. Additionally, we recognize three common pitfalls that hamper the adoption of research results by stakeholders: the lack of a clear choice of authors on whether to target researchers (contributing advanced methods) or practitioners (providing managerial insights), the use of ill-fitted performance measures in models and the failure to understandably report on the hospital setting and method-related assumptions. We provide specific guidelines that help to avoid these pitfalls. First, we show how to build up an article based on the choice of the target group (i.e., researchers or practitioners). Making a clear distinction between target groups impacts the problem setting, the research task, the reported findings, and the conclusions. Second, we discuss points that need to be considered by researchers when deciding on the used performance measures. Third, we list the assumptions that need to be included in articles in order to enable readers to decide whether the presented research is relevant to them.