Total weighted tardiness is a measure of customer satisfaction. Minimizing it represents satisfying the general requirement of on-time delivery. In this research, we consider an ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm to solve the problem of scheduling unrelated parallel machines to minimize total weighted tardiness. The problem is NP-hard in the strong sense. Computational results show that th...

abstract: this paper considers the problem of scheduling n jobs on m unrelated parallel machines with sequence-dependent setup times. to better comply with industrial situations, jobs have varying due dates and ready times and there are some precedence relations between them. furthermore sequence-dependent setup times and anticipatory setups are included in the proposed model. the objective is ...