Single machine scheduling to minimize maximum lateness subject to release dates and precedence constraints

This paper considers the problem of finding a nonpreemptive schedule for a single machine to minimize the maximum lateness with release dates and precedence constraints. A branch and bound algorithm is developed. The algorithm uses four different heuristics to find upper bounds at the initial branch node: early release date heuristic, modified Schrage's heuristic, heuristic BLOCK, and a variable neighborhood descent procedure. At each branch node, two branches evolve from a schedule found by heuristic BLOCK using a binary branching rule based on bottleneck and critical jobs, and a lower bound is obtained by optimally solving the relaxed problem with preemption. The algorithm solves 14,984 out of the 15,000 systematically generated instances with up to 1,000 jobs within I minute of CPU time. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.