SCHEDULING OPEN SHOPS TO MINIMIZE TOTAL WEIGHTED TARDINESS

ABSTRACT It is well known that most of the open shop scheduling problems are NP-hard. Currently, the open shop scheduling research has been focusing on minimizing makespan. In this study, we shall examine the total weighted tardiness open shop scheduling problem, which is also NP-hard. We present a heuristic solution method, based on iterative search strategy, for solving large-scaled problems. Experimental results indicate that the proposed heuristic method significantly outperforms other methods in literature. Also, we present an exact solution method, based on branch-and-bound, for solving small-scaled problems.