A note on the Pivot and Complement heuristic for 0-1 programming problems

When solving large scale integer and mixed integer programming problems it is very important to find good feasible integer solutions at an early stage in the solution process. The Pivot and Complement heuristic is a procedure which very often generates good solutions at a relatively low computational cost. In this paper we demonstrate that repeated use of the Pivot and Complement heuristic with an additional objective function constraint, often gives a better solution than the one obtained in the first trial. We present some results obtained on a number of practical large scale problems of project sequencing type.