A note on exact and heuristic algorithms for the identical parallel machine scheduling problem

A recent paper (Davidović et al., J. Heuristics, 18:549–569, 2012) presented a bee colony metaheuristic for scheduling independent tasks to identical processors, evaluating its performance on a benchmark set of instances from the literature. We examine two exact algorithms from the literature, the former published in 1995, the latter in 2008 (and not cited by the authors). We show that both such algorithms solve to proven optimality all the considered instances in a computing time that is several orders of magnitude smaller than the time taken by the new algorithm to produce an approximate solution.