A dominance-based heuristic to minimise completion time variance in a single machine system

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of minimising the variance of job completion times in a deterministic single-machine scheduling system. Minimising completion time variance is an appropriate objective in scheduling environments where service uniformity is essential. Due to the NP-hard nature of the problem, various heuristics have been presented to obtain a near-optimal solution. In this paper, we introduce a new heuristic based on some powerful precedence (dominance) relation structures, including the concepts of permanent and temporary precedence (dominance) relationships, to determine the positions of adjacent and non-adjacent jobs in a sequence. Our computational experiments demonstrate that the proposed heuristic significantly outperforms the existing ones in deriving the optimal or near-optimal solutions for three well-known sets of benchmark problems and some large randomly generated instances. [Received: 5 August 2018; Revised: 24 December 2018; Accepted: 23 January 2019]