Department of Mathematics, University of Lagos, Nigeria; School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa
Adamu, M.O., Department of Mathematics, University of Lagos, Nigeria; Adewumi, A., School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa
This article considers the due window scheduling problem to minimise the number of early and tardy jobs on identical parallel machines. This problem is known to be NP complete and thus finding an optimal solution is unlikely. Three meta-heuristics and their hybrids are proposed and extensive computational experiments are conducted. The purpose of this paper is to compare the performance of these meta-heuristics and their hybrids and to determine the best among them. Detailed comparative tests have also been conducted to analyse the different heuristics with the simulated annealing hybrid giving the best result. © 2015, South African Institute of Industrial Engineering. All rights reserved.