Improved heuristics for the early/tardy scheduling problem with no idle time

A dispatch rule and a greedy procedure are presented for the single machine earliness/tardiness scheduling problem with no idle time and compared with the best of the existing dispatch rules. Both dispatch rules use a lookahead parameter that had previously been set at a fixed value. We develop functions that map some instance statistics into appropriate values for that parameter. We also consider the use of dominance rules to improve the solutions obtained by the heuristics. The computational results show that the function-based versions of the heuristics outperform their fixed value counterparts and that the use of the dominance rules can indeed improve solution quality with little additional computational effort.