Designing a tabu search algorithm for unrelated parallel machines problem with total weighted tardy jobs as the objective

Abstract

The problem considered in this paper is a set of independent jobs on unrelated parallel machines with sequence-dependent setup times so as to minimize total weighted tardy jobs. A tabu search algorithm is developed to solve the problem. In order to ensure the maximum effectiveness and efficiency of the tabu search algorithm, an effective initial solution and efficient move strategy are proposed to assist in the tabu search. To evaluate the performance of the suggested algorithm, some heuristics rules, such as the earliest weighted due date and the shortest weighted processing time, are examined for comparison purposes. In addition to this, computational experiments are performed on randomly generated test problems. Results show that the proposed tabu search algorithm is a promising method for solving this problem.