The single-machine total tardiness problem with unequal release times and a linear deterioration

Recently, machine scheduling problems with deteriorating jobs have received more attention from the scheduling research community. In this paper we consider a single-machine scheduling problem with a linear deteriorating effect and unequal release times. The objective is to minimize the total tardiness. We propose a branch-and-bound algorithm incorporating with several dominance properties and two lower bounds to search for the optimal solution. In addition, we propose a marriage in honey-bees optimization algorithm (MBO) to provide a near-optimal solution. The computational experiment is also conducted to evaluate the impacts of the parameters over the performances of the proposed algorithms.