Single-machine scheduling for minimizing earliness and tardiness penalties by meta-heuristic approaches

We consider the problem of scheduling a number of jobs on a single machine against a restrictive common due date. The paper consists of two parts: firstly a new and appropriate problem representation is developed. As the restrictive common due date problem is known to be intractable we decided, secondly, to apply meta-heuristics, namely evolutionary strategies, simulated annealing and threshold accepting. We demonstrate that our application of these meta-heuristics is efficient in obtaining near-optimal solutions by solving 140 benchmark problems with up to 1000 jobs. Furthermore, we compare their solution quality and find that a new variant of threshold accepting is superior to the other approaches. q 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.