Heuristics for scheduling a single machine subject to unequal job release times

Solving realistic scheduling problems in a reasonable amount of computer time almost inevitably requires the use of heuristic methods. Such a problem is the one-machine sequencing problem where the jobs are subject to unequal release times. Here a recently published heuristic is generalised and these generalisations are shown to provide very good solutions to some large problems in a modest amount of computer time. The heuristic is further extended by applying the method of tabu search, which is used for investigating the quality of the solutions obtained by the original heuristics.