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Solving the response time variability problem by means of the cross-entropy method

The response time variability problem (RTVP) is an NP-hard combinatorial scheduling problem that has recently appeared in the literature. The RTVP has a wide range of production line systems applications such as sequencing the models to be produced on a mixed-model assembly line in a just-in-time context. This problem occurs whenever several units of different models need to be sequenced so as to minimise the variability of the distance between any two consecutive units of the same model. A mathematical mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model has been presented by another study, but the practical limit for obtaining optimal solutions is around 40 units to be scheduled. Another study has developed five heuristic algorithms to solve non-small RTVP instances. We propose to solve the RTVP by means of the metaheuristic cross-entropy (CE) method, which has been developed recently. We report on the computational experiments in which the CE method is compared with the five heuristic algorithms proposed in the literature.