Design of iterated local search algorithms -: An example application to the single machine total weighted tardiness problem

In this article we investigate the application of iterated local search (ILS) to the single machine total weighted tardiness problem. Our research is inspired by the recently proposed iterated dynasearch approach, which was shown to be a very effective ILS algorithm for this problem. In this paper we systematically configure an ILS algorithms by optimizing the single procedures part of ILS and optimizing their interaction. We come up with a highly effective ILS approach, which outperforms our implementation of the iterated dynasearch algorithm on the hardest benchmark instances.