Algorithms for rescheduling jobs with a LIFO buffer to minimize the weighted number of late jobs

Abstract

Rescheduling can help to improve the quality of a schedule with respect to an initially given sequence. In this paper, we consider the possibility of rescheduling jobs arriving for processing at a single machine under the following limitations: (a) jobs can only be moved toward the end of the schedule and not toward the front, and (b) when a job is taken out of the sequence, it is put on a buffer of limited capacity before being reinserted in its new position closer to the end of the sequence. The buffer is organized as a stack with a last-in/first-out policy. As an objective function, we consider the minimization of the weighted number of late jobs. For this NP-hard problem, we first provide two different integer linear programming (ILP) formulations. Furthermore, we develop a branch-and-bound algorithm with a branching rule based on the movement of jobs. Then a new pseudo-polynomial dynamic programming algorithm is presented which utilizes dominance criteria and an efficient handling of states. Our computational experiments with up to 100 jobs show that this algorithm performs remarkably well and can be seen as the current method of choice.