A natural starting strategy for Aronson’s heuristic 1 for solving the deterministic, single operator, multiple machine, multiple run cyclic scheduling problem

The semiautomatic nature of machinery often makes it economical to assign more than one machine to a single operator in a cyclic schedule. If the tasks, executed in a cyclic schedule, are not ordered properly, excessive interference can occur, even in deterministic problems. In a recent article, Aronson presented two efficient and effective heuristics for solving a more realistic generalization of the deterministic cyclic scheduling problem-one that has a single operator, multiple nonidentical machines, and multiple nonidentical runs on each machine. Here, the author supplies a natural strategy for initializing the first heuristic, because it is not satisfactory to run the heuristic many times, each time starting with a first run of a different machine, to obtain a reasonable solution. This modification is necessary to improve the performance of the heuristic, for ease of implementation, and savings of computational effort.