Dominance-based heuristics for one-machine total cost scheduling problems

Abstract

We study the one-machine scheduling problem with release dates and we look at several objective functions including total (weighted) tardiness and total (weighted) completion time. We describe dominance rules for these criteria, as well as techniques for using these dominance rules to build heuristic solutions. We use them to improve certain well-known greedy heuristic algorithms from the literature. Finally, we introduce a Tabu Search method with a neighborhood based on our dominance rules. Experiments show the effectiveness of our techniques in obtaining very good solutions for all studied criteria. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.