Heuristics for the response time variability problem

The recently introduced response time variability problem (RTVP) is a scheduling problem that has a broad range of real-life applications, for example, to sequence the models to be produced on a mixed-model assembly line. Previous studies include heuristic algorithms and mathematical programming models, whose practical limit for obtaining optimal solutions is around 40 units to be scheduled. In this paper, we propose and test new algorithms that combine heuristic procedures for obtaining initial sequences and several local optimisation procedures. [Received 24 July 2009; Revised 11 June 2010; Revised 18 February 2011; Accepted 01 May 2011]