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,...

It is well-known that for many project scheduling problems the Space AS of active schedules contains at least one optimal solution for each feasible instance, so restricting heuristic construction methods to AS will improve algorithmic efficiency without foresaking the chance to eventually find...

This paper introduces a new general framework for genetic algorithms to solve a broad range of optimization problems. When designing a genetic algorithm, there may be several alternatives for a component such as crossover, mutation or decoding procedure, and it may be difficult to determine the...

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...

In project management, the project duration can often be compressed by accelerating some of its activities at an additional expense. This is the so-called time-cost tradeoff problem which has been extensively studied in the past. However, the discrete version of the problem which is of great...

This paper addresses the airport flight gate assignment problem with multiple objectives. The objectives are to maximize the total flight gate preferences, to minimize the number of towing activities and to minimize the absolute deviation of the new gate assignment from a so-called reference...