The problem of scheduling jobs on uniform parallel machines with makespan ( C max ) minimization objective was studied. Due to its non-deterministic polynomial-time ( N ) hard nature,it is difficult to achieve an optimal solution with traditional optimization methods. For this reason,a novel modified differential evolution ( MDE) was proposed to tackle the uniform parallel machine scheduling problem ( UPMSP ) ,taking out the mutation operation and introducing the roulette wheel selection strategy into conventional differential evolution ( DE ) . In MDE, more high quality individuals can be reserved to update the population. And the control parameter F in conventional DE was removed,which could simplify the DE. To verify the proposed MDE,162 randomly generated instances were conducted. The comparison results with DE,genetic algorithm ( GA ) ,simulated annealing ( SA ) , and largest processing time ( LPT) method show that the MDE is an efficient and competitive approach in solving UPMSP.
