Novel Heuristic Approach for Solving Multi-objective Scheduling Problems

In this paper, we studied the scheduling of jobs on a single machine. Each of n jobs is to be processed without interruption and becomes available for processing at time zero. The objective is to find a processing order of the jobs, minimizing the sum of maximum earliness and maximum tardiness. This problem is to minimize the earliness and tardiness values, so this model is equivalent to the just-in-time production system. Our lower bound depended on the decomposition of the problem into two subprograms. We presented a novel heuristic approach to find a near-optimal solution for the problem. This approach depends on finding efficient solutions for two problems. The first problem is minimizing total completion time and maximum tardiness. The second is minimizing total completion time and maximum earliness. We used these efficient solutions to find a near-optimal solution for another problem which is a sum of maximum earliness and maximum tardiness. This means we eliminate the total completion time from the two problems. The algorithm was tested on a set of problems of different n. Computational results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.