A dynamical ant colony optimization with heuristics for scheduling jobs on a single machine with a common due date

Abstract

The problem of scheduling jobs on a single machine with a common due date is one of NP-complete problems. It is to minimize the total earliness and tardiness penalties. This chapter introduces a Dynamical Ant Colony Optimization (DACO) with heuristics for scheduling jobs on a single machine with a common due date. In the proposed algorithm, the parameter of heuristic information is dynamically adjusted. Furthermore, additional heuristics are embedded into DACO as local search to escape from local optima. Compared with other existing approaches in the literature, the proposed algorithm is very useful for scheduling jobs on a single machine with a common due date. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.