Minimising maximum response time

The minmax response time problem (mRTP) is a scheduling problem that has recently appeared in the literature and can be considered as a fair sequencing problem. This kind of problems appears in a wide range of real-world applications in mixed-model assembly lines, computer systems, periodic maintenance and others. The mRTP arises whenever products, clients or jobs need to be sequenced in such a way that the maximum time between the points at which they receive the necessary resources is minimised. The mRTP has been solved in the literature with a greedy heuristic. The objective of this paper is to improve the solution of this problem by means of exact and heuristic methods. We propose one mixed integer linear programming model, nine local search procedures and five metaheuristic algorithms. Extensive computational experiments are carried out to test them. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.