A simulated annealing approach to bicriteria scheduling problems on a single machine

In this paper, we apply a simulated annealing approach to two bicriteria scheduling problems on a single machine. The first problem is the strongly NP-hard problem of minimizing total flowtime and maximum earliness. The second one is the NP-hard problem of minimizing total flowtime and number of tardy jobs. We experiment on different neighbourhood structures as well as other parameters of the simulated annealing approach to improve its performance. Our computational experiments show that the developed approach yields solutions that are very close to lower bounds and hence very close to the optimal solutions of their corresponding problems for the minimization of total flowtime and maximum earliness. For the minimization of total flowtime and number tardy, our experiments show that the simulated annealing approach yields results that are superior to randomly generated schedules.