Scheduling jobs on a single machine to maximize the total revenue of jobs

In today's hyper-competitive marketplace, many products like memory chips and computers are characterized by short life cycles and rapidly declining sales prices. This implies that the amount of revenue generated as a result of completing a product (job) may be decreasing as its completion time is delayed. In such an environment, there is a decided preference for the maximization of product revenues as an important objective. Based on the assumption that the decreasing rate of revenue is dependent on their product types, we intend to develop a searching algorithm and some heuristic algorithms to locate optimal and near-optimal job sequences, respectively, and thereby maximize total earned revenue.