Empirically discovering dominance relations for scheduling problems using an evolutionary algorithm

Many dominance relations have been established in the literature for scheduling problems where they are mainly used in implicit enumeration techniques to further reduce the search space for finding an optimal solution. In this paper, we propose a novel method for discovering dominance relations for scheduling problems. We discover dominance relations by using an evolutionary algorithm. The proposed method of empirically discovering dominance relations can be used for any scheduling problem. After the description of the method, we apply it to a specific scheduling problem. The specific problem is the multimedia data objects scheduling problem for WWW applications which can be modelled as the two-machine flowshop problem of minimizing maximum lateness with separate setup times. The performances of the dominance relations obtained by the proposed method as well as the existing four dominance relations in literature are analysed. The results of the computational experiments show that the proposed method is quite efficient.