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We propose a dead-end control algorithm for the exact solution of NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. The efficiency of the algorithm is demonstrated by examples of solving the set-partition and 0-1 knapsack problems. The paper also shows that the use of the idea of dead-end controls when implementing the dynamic programming method can considerably reduce the number of problem state variables at each optimization step. A comparative analysis of the proposed method with known algorithms for solving these problems is carried out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The m-machine no-wait flowshop scheduling problem, with the objective of minimizing total completion time subject to the constraint that makespan has to be less than or equal to a certain value, is addressed in this paper. First, an algorithm is proposed to find an upper bound on the makespan in case the upper bound is not given or unknown. Given the upper bound on makespan, a proposed algorithm ( PAL) with five versions L (1, 5, 10, 15, and 20) and a genetic algorithm ( GA) are utilized for solving the problem. Furthermore, a dominance relation is established for the case of four machines. The five versions of PAL and GA are evaluated on randomly generated problems with different number of jobs and number of machines. Computational experiments show that the errors of PA10, PA15, and PA20 are much smaller than that of GA while the CPU times of PA10, PA15, and PA20 are significantly smaller than that of GA. Therefore, the algorithms PA10, PA15, and PA20 are superior to the GA algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tool switching problem is used to determine a job sequence and the tools to be loaded on a machine with the objective of minimising the total number of tool switches. In this paper, in order to develop a practical and efficient approach to solving this problem, a beam-search-based algorithm is introduced to formulate the solution space of the problem. The performance of the heuristic algorithm is compared with the heuristic developed by Bard. The proposed algorithm is then tested on some random test problems. The results show that the beam-search-based algorithm performs well in terms of computational efficiency and solution quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]