A drastic hybrid heuristic algorithm to approach to JIT policy considering controllable processing times

Job scheduling has always been a challenging task in modern manufacturing and the most real life scheduling problems which involves multi-criteria, multi-machine environments. In this research, the single-machine scheduling problem is studied in which job processing times are controllable, namely, they may vary within a specified interval. The goal of this research is to minimize total tardiness and earliness on a single machine, simultaneously. In this context, we first propose a mathematical model for the considered problem and then a net benefit compression–net benefit expansion heuristic is presented for obtaining the set of amounts of compression and expansion of jobs processing times in a given sequence. Two meta-heuristic approaches are then employed to solve medium-to-large-sized problems as local search methods. Thereafter, we apply a hybrid method based on our heuristic as well as these two meta-heuristics in order to obtain solutions with higher quality within lesser computational time. The addressed problem is NP-hard since the single machine total tardiness problem is already NP-hard. The computational results show that our proposed heuristics can effectively solve such Just-In-Time problem with a high-quality solution.