A Very Fast Heuristic for Combinatorial Optimization With Specific Application to Priority Rule Sequencing in Operations Management: Fuzzy Greedy Search

This article presents mathematics of a generic polynomial-time heuristic which can be integrated into approaches for hard combinatorial optimization problems. The proposed method evaluates objects in a way that combines fuzzy reasoning with a greedy mechanism, thereby exploiting a fuzzy solution space using greedy methods. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method are demonstrated on job-shop scheduling as one of the most challenging classical sequencing problems in the area of combinatorial optimization.