A tabu search heuristic for a sequence-dependent and time-dependent scheduling problem on a single machine

This paper introduces a tabu search heuristic for a production scheduling problem with sequence-dependent and time-dependent setup times on a single machine. The problem consists in scheduling a set of dependent jobs, where the transition between two jobs comprises an unrestricted setup that can be performed at any time, and a restricted setup that must be performed outside of given time intervals. The setup time between two jobs is thus a function of the completion time of the first job. The tabu search heuristic relies on complete relocate and swap moves, and a surrogate objective function is used to speed-up the neighbourhood evaluation. Computational experiments show that the proposed heuristic outperforms a recent branch-and-cut algorithm in terms of computing time. Furthermore, on instances where the branch-and-cut algorithm cannot find the optimal solution, the heuristic always identifies a better solution.