A new metaheuristic procedure for improving the solution of the response time variability problem

Resumen

The response time variability problem (RTVP) is a scheduling problem that arises whenever products, clients or jobs need to be sequenced in such a way that the variability in the time between the instants at which they receive the necessary resources is minimised. The RTVP is an NP-hard problem and heuristic and metaheuristic techniques are needed to solve non-small instances. The best results for the RTVP were obtained with a variable neighbourhood search algorithm and a tabu search algorithm. We propose a simulated annealing-based algorithm to solve the RTVP. A computational experiment shows that, on average, the proposed algorithm improves the best procedures published in the literature. Keywords: response time variability, scheduling, fait sequences, metaheuristics