An ant colony optimization approach for the single machine total tardiness problem

Machine scheduling is a central task in production planning. In general it means the problem of scheduling job operations on a given number of available machines. We consider a machine scheduling problem with one machine, the Single Machine Total Tardiness Problem. To solve this NP hard problem, we apply the ant colony optimization metaphor, a recently developed meta-heuristic that has proven its potential for various other combinatorial optimization problems. We test our algorithm using 125 benchmark problems and present computational results