Single machine preemptive scheduling by hybridized meta-heuristic approach

This paper is investigated the bi-criteria scheduling problem of minimizing the sum of the earliness and tardiness penalties on a single machine while the preemption is allowed. The problem which is known to be NP-hard is compatible with the concepts of just-in-Time (JIT) production. While the complexity of the problem is high, therefore, meta-heuristic algorithms are highly applied for such problems. Imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) is a novel global search heuristic that uses imperialistic competition as a source of inspiration. Two meta-heuristic algorithms such as ICA and hybrid algorithm of ICA and genetic algorithm are applied. The computational results show that the performance of the hybrid algorithm is much better than ICA in finding the best solutions and in execution speed.