Interval-indexed formulation based heuristics for single machine total weighted tardiness problem

in this paper, we solve the single machine total weighted tardiness problem by using integer programming and linear programming based heuristic algorithms. Interval-indexed formulation is used to formulate the problem. We discuss several methods to form the intervals and different post-processing methods. Then, we show how our algorithm can be used to improve a population of a genetic algorithm. We also provide some computational results that show the effectiveness of our algorithm. Many aspects of our heuristic algorithm are quite general and can be applied to other scheduling and combinatorial optimization problems. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.