On the afternoon of June 5th, Professor Chu Chengbin from the University of Paris-Est was invited to give an academic lecture titled "Branch-and-Price Algorithm for Solving Unrelated Parallel Machine Scheduling with Machine Usage Costs" in Lecture Hall 214 of the School of Management at Northwestern Polytechnical University. This lecture was the 13th installment of the School of Management's 2024 Overseas Lecture Series, chaired by Professor Hong Zhaofu, and attended by graduate students and some faculty members from the School of Management.

During the lecture, Professor Chu Chengbin approached the topic by identifying, constructing, and solving the problem. He introduced how to use the branch-and-price method to solve the unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem with machine usage costs. Initially, Chu Chengbin provided a detailed introduction to the unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem and constructed a mathematical model based on the actual problem, including the objective function and constraints, laying the foundation for the subsequent algorithm design. Chu Chengbin reformulated the original problem as a Set-Partitioning Problem (SPP), viewing task allocation as a series of set partitioning issues, where each set represents a possible task allocation scheme, and proposed how to address the pricing problem. Finally, Chu Chengbin described how to solve the problem using the branch-and-price algorithm and presented the computational results of the algorithm on a series of test instances, demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of the algorithm.

After the presentation, students actively raised questions, and Professor Chu Chengbin patiently answered everyone's doubts. He believes that specific problems require specific analysis, and when constructing problems, reasonable assumptions should be made based on real-world scenarios. At the same time, the generation of examples must be able to illustrate the problem. This lecture provided valuable advice for teachers and students engaged in algorithm optimization research, from which everyone benefited greatly.

Introduction to the Speaker:

Chu Chengbin is currently a professor at the University of Paris-Est and a national-level talent. He has been listed in Stanford University's "Top 2% of Global Scientists." Professor Chu's research focuses on the optimization of production and logistics systems. He has published 3 monographs and over 200 articles in international journals. Google Scholar shows that he has been cited more than 12,700 times, with two articles winning the best paper awards in their respective journals. He has undertaken more than 20 research projects funded by the European Union, French central and local governments, or enterprises, with a total budget of nearly 10 million euros. His results have been applied in dozens of enterprises of different sizes and industries, creating significant economic and social benefits. He has served as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, and IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, as well as a member of the editorial board of Computers & Industrial Engineering.