Most scheduling problems are notoriously intractable, so the majority of algorithms for them are heuristic in nature. Priority rule-based methods still constitute the most important class of these heuristics. Of these, in turn, parameterized biased random sampling methods have attracted...

For most computationally intractable problems there exists no heuristic which performs best on all instances. Usually, a heuristic characterized as best will perform good on the majority of instances but leave a minority on which other heuristics do better. In priority rule-based scheduling,...

For most computationally intractable problems there exists no heuristic that is equally effective on all instances. Rather, any given heuristic may do well on some instances but will do worse on others. Indeed, even the 'best' heuristics will be dominated by others on at least some subclasses of...