A HYBRID SIMULATED ANNEALING HEURISTIC FOR MULTIMEDIA OBJECT REQUESTS SCHEDULING PROBLEM.

The authors consider the multimedia object requests scheduling problem, an important problem in information systems such as World Wide Web applications. The problem can be modelled as a flowshop scheduling problem for which many solutions have been proposed with respect to different objective functions. This article considers the objective function of minimizing the variance of response time, which is crucial, as end users expect fair treatment of their service requests. This problem is known to be NP-hard, and therefore two heuristics to solve the problem have been proposed in the literature. This article presents a new heuristic that is shown to perform much better than the two existing ones; for example, the overall average error of the proposed heuristic has an improvement of about 500% and 1500% over the two existing ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]