The Challenge of Sequence-Dependent Setups: Proposal for a Scheduling Competition Track on One Machine Sequencing Problems

Designing a scheduling competition to attract researchers from the several fields interested in scheduling problems seems a challenging, and highly worthwhile effort. In this paper, we propose a design for one possible track of this proposed scheduling competition. Specifically, we propose a track aimed at one machine sequencing problems. We argue that any such track must include problems with sequencedependent setups. Our proposed single machine sequencing track would additionally include a spectrum of objective functions of increasing optimization difficulty under sequence-dependent setups. We also offer a problem instance generator along with a set of benchmark problem instances for one potential competition problem—the weighted tardiness scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setups.