A Hybrid Large Neighborhood Search Method for Minimizing Makespan on Unrelated Parallel Batch Processing Machines with Incompatible Job Families
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Very good work, contains a lot of interesting information. It should be published. The following changes are necessary:
There are a number of editorial errors. Editorial style does not comply with MDPI requirements.
Analyze keywords and improve them. Are you sure the ones you indicated correspond to the article?
Analyze the abstract - it now deviates from the article. You need to make the reader more interested.
In the introduction, add the most important goals and elements of the article.
Add highlights to your work
The methodology is not very good. Please rewrite this section.
Correct the conclusions, the current form is too short.
Author Response
Please check our point-by-point response to the comments.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Let me begin by stating what I think are the positive aspects of this paper:
(1) The subject is quite interesting and useful.
(2) The organization of the paper is very good, the Figures and Tables are meaningful and interesting, and the whole presentation helps the reader to understand and appreciate the aim of the paper. This, combined with the Introduction and the references, manage to convince the reader that the authors have excellent knowledge of this area, as well as a good intuition where the research in this field should lead.
(3) The other noteworthy observation is the good formatting and typesetting of all the Figures and the Tables that have enabled me to read and understand the rationale behind their approach.
I think that there are very few typos.
· Line 73: “… handle with the problem.” - I think “the” should be omitted.
· Page 8 Algorithm 3: the indentation seems to be a bit off (particularly line 12 of Algorithm 3).
· Is the link “http://www.dpi.ufv.br/projetos/scheduling/upbpm.htm” (lines 336 and 437) correct? I failed to open this site.
Ideally, I would like to see a small scale example because I think that the inherent technicalities are quite demanding on the part of the reader, and so the best way for the authors to communicate the subtle details of their methodology is by presenting a concrete example. I realize however that the author have put a lot of effort in this paper, and they have really made extensive tests in order to arrive at their conclusions. This accounts for the length of this paper. Hence, I understand that such a request would be too much at this point.
In conclusion, this work is quite interesting, well written, illustrated and presented, and I believe that this paper deserves publication.
Author Response
Please check our point-by-point response to the comments.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
In this work, the authors proposed a hybrid large neighbourhood search algorithm to solve the scheduling problem on unrelated parallel batch processing machines. They verified the effectiveness of the proposed proposed HLNS algorithm, and the HLNS outperforms commercial optimization solver and other meta-heuristics. In general, the work is interesting and several minor issues are raised below.
1. The python version they used should be clarified.
2. The fonts in most tables seem inconsistent, i.e. some are in bold while others are not.
3. The authors should revise Figure 2 and 3 by increasing the resolution.
4. Consistent caption should be used. e.g. Figure 4 should be Fig. 4.
5. The average values and root mean squre error should be included when showing the experiment results (such as Table 3-7) .
Author Response
Please check our point-by-point response to the comments.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
