Metaheuristic algorithms hybridised with variable neighbourhood search for solving the response time variability problem

• Albert Corominas ^[1] ; Alberto García-Villoria ^[1] ; Rafael Pastor ^[1]
  1. [1] Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

     Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

     Barcelona, España

     
• Localización: Top, ISSN-e 1863-8279, ISSN 1134-5764, Vol. 21, Nº. 2, 2013, págs. 296-312
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The response time variability problem (RTVP) is a scheduling problem with a wide range of real-world applications: mixed-model assembly lines, multi-threaded computer systems, network environments, broadcast of commercial videotapes and machine maintenance, among others. The RTVP arises whenever products, clients or jobs need to be sequenced in such a way that the variability in the time between the points at which they receive the necessary resources is minimised. Since the RTVP is NP-hard, several heuristic and metaheuristic techniques are needed to solve non-small instances. The published metaheuristic procedure that obtained the best solutions, on average, for non-small RTVP instances is an algorithm based on a variant of the variable neighbourhood search (VNS), called Reduced VNS (RVNS). We propose hybridising RVNS with three existing algorithms based on tabu search, multi-start and particle swarm optimisation. The aim is to combine the strengths of the metaheuristics. A computational experiment is carried out and it is shown that, on average, all proposed hybrid methods are able to improve the best published solutions.