A Study of Recombination and Local Search Operators for the Single Machine Scheduling Problem with Release Dates

The single machine scheduling problem with release dates has wide real-life applications and is however NP-hard. This paper focuses on a study of how to select a suitable combination of recombination operators and local search methods within the search framework of memetic algorithms. We study two crossovers for permutation flow-shop scheduling and assess the effectiveness of simulated annealing and variable neighborhood descent as local optimization procedures in a basic memetic algorithm. Experimental results indicate that the combination of the position-based crossover and the simulated annealing heuristic helps the algorithm to achieve competitive performance for the solved problem. The findings of this work would be valuable for future research on single machine scheduling algorithms.