Heuristics for the mirrored traveling tournament problem

Professional sports leagues are a major economic activity around the world. Teams and leagues do not want to waste their investments in players and structure in consequence of poor schedules of games.Game scheduling is a difficult task, involving several decision makers, different types of constraints, and multiple objectives to optimize. The Traveling Tournament Problem abstracts … Read more

A hybrid bin-packing heuristic to multiprocessor scheduling

The multiprocessor scheduling problem consists in scheduling a set of tasks with known processing times into a set of identical processors so as to minimize their makespan, i.e., the maximum processing time over all processors. We propose a new heuristic for solving the multiprocessor scheduling problem, based on a hybrid heuristic to the bin packing … Read more

Dynasearch neighborhood for the earliness-tardiness scheduling problem with release dates and setup constraints

The one-machine scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times and costs and earliness-tardiness penalties is addressed. This problem is NP-complete, so that local search approaches are very useful to efficiently find good feasible schedules. In this paper, we present an extension of the dynasearch neighborhood for this problem. Finding the best schedule in this neighborhood is … Read more

Efficient neighborhood search for Just-in-Time scheduling problems

This paper addresses the one-machine scheduling problem where the objective is to minimize a sum of costs such as earliness-tardiness costs. Since the sequencing problem is NP-hard, local search is very useful for finding good solutions. Unlike scheduling problems with regular cost functions, the scheduling (or timing) problem is not trivial when the sequence is … Read more

On the Complexity of Scheduling with Elastic Times

We consider the problem of scheduling hypermedia documents with elastic times. The objects have variable durations characterized by ideal, minimum, and maximum values. A schedule is a set of tensions on the arcs of the precedence graph which also represents synchronization constraints. We consider the problem of deciding if there exists a schedule in which … Read more

Multiprocessor Scheduling under Precedence Constraints: Polyhedral Results

We consider the problem of scheduling a set of tasks related by precedence constraints to a set of processors, so as to minimize their makespan. Each task has to be assigned to a unique processor and no preemption is allowed. A new integer programming formulation of the problem is given and strong valid inequalities are … Read more

Automatic Scheduling of Hypermedia Documents with Elastic Times]

The problem of automatic scheduling hypermedia documents consists in finding the optimal starting times and durations of objects to be presented, to ensure spatial and temporal consistency of a presentation while respecting limits on shrinking and stretching the ideal duration of each object. The combinatorial nature of the minimization of the number of objects whose … Read more

On-Line Scheduling to Minimize Average Completion Time Revisited

We consider the scheduling problem of minimizing the average weighted completion time on identical parallel machines when jobs are arriving over time. For both the preemptive and the nonpreemptive setting, we show that straightforward extensions of Smith’s ratio rule yield smaller competitive ratios than the previously best-known deterministic on-line algorithms. Citation Working Paper 4435-03, Sloan … Read more

Computational study of a cutting plane algorithm for University Course Timetabling

In this paper we describe a successful case-study where a Branch-and-Cut algorithm yields the \lq\lq optimal” solution of a real-world timetabling problem of University courses \emph{(University Course Timetabling problem)}. The problem is formulated as a \emph{Set Packing problem} with side constraints. To tighten the initial formulation, we utilize well-known valid inequalities of the Set Packing … Read more

Scheduling a sequence of tasks with general completion costs

Scheduling a sequence of tasks – in the acceptation of finding the execution times – is not a trivial problem when the optimization criterion is irregular as for instance in earliness-tardiness problems. This paper presents an efficient Dynamic Programming algorithm to solve the problem with general cost functions depending on the end time of the … Read more