  Motivated by the need of quick job (re-)scheduling, we examine an elaborate
scheduling environment under the objective of total weighted tardiness
minimization. The examined problem variant moves well beyond existing
literature, as it considers unrelated machines, sequence-dependent and
machine-dependent setup times and a renewable resource constraint on the number
of simultaneous setups. For this variant, we provide a relaxed MILP to
calculate lower bounds, thus estimating a worst-case optimality gap. As a fast
exact approach appears not plausible for instances of practical importance, we
extend known (meta-)heuristics to deal with the problem at hand, coupling them
with a Constraint Programming (CP) component - vital to guarantee the
non-violation of the problem's constraints - which optimally allocates
resources with respect to tardiness minimization. The validity and versatility
of employing different (meta-)heuristics exploiting a relaxed MILP as a quality
measure is revealed by our extensive experimental study, which shows that the
methods deployed have complementary strengths depending on the instance
parameters. Since the problem description has been obtained from a textile
manufacturer where jobs of diverse size arrive continuously under tight
deadlines, we also discuss the practical impact of our approach in terms of
both tardiness decrease and broader managerial insights.

Optimization and Control