An Novel Metaheuristic for the Order Scheduling with Ready Times

Abstract

Recently the customer order scheduling models has continued growing attention in research community. However, customer order scheduling problem with the ready time is only relatively few. In light of this limitation, we then address a multi-facility order scheduling with ready times to find a sequence to minimize the total weighted completion time. Because the complexity of this problem is very difficult, we use five existing heuristics and two-type iterative greedy algorithms to find near-optimal solutions. All of the proposed heuristics are also improved by pairwise improvement. Finally, we conduct a one-way analysis of variance and Fisher's least significant difference tests to assess the performances of all the proposed algorithms.