A new lower bounding scheme for the total weighted tardiness problem

We propose a new dominance rule that provides a sufficient condition for local optimality for the 1∥Σw1Ti problem. We prove that if any sequence violates the proposed dominance rule, then switching the violating jobs either lowers the total weighted tardiness or leaves it unchanged. Therefore, it can be used in reducing the number of alternatives for finding the optimal solution in any exact approach. We introduce an algorithm based on the dominance rule, which is compared to a number of competing approaches for a set of randomly generated problems. We also test the impact of the dominance rule on different lower bounding schemes. Our computational results over 30,000 problems indicate that the amount of improvement is statistically significant for both upper and lower bounding schemes. © 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd, All rights reserved.