Heuristics for the Early/tardy Scheduling Problem with Release Dates

In this paper we consider the single machine earliness/tardiness scheduling problem with different release dates and no unforced idle time. We analyse the performance of several dispatch rules, a greedy procedure and a decision theory local search heuristic. The dispatch rules use a lookahead parameter whose value must be specified. We perform some experiments to determine an appropriate value for this parameter. The use of dominance rules to improve the solutions obtained by these heuristics is also considered. The computational results show that the use of the dominance rules can indeed improve the solution quality with little additional computational effort. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first analysis of heuristic performance for the early/tardy scheduling problem with release dates and no unforced idle time.