Simulated annealing applied to the total tardiness problem

Performance of Simulated Annealing (SA) as a heuristic on the well known total tardiness problem is tested. The experimental results indicate that the applicability of SA to the total tardiness problem is high. The authors found that the performance of the SA heuristic is not very sensitive to the starting solution and that slower cooling results in better solutions. Another interesting finding of this study is that a random generation of the neighborhood solutions results in better solutions more often than other methods.