We relax some assumptions of the traditional scheduling problem and suggest an adapted meta-heuristic algorithm to optimize efficient utilization of resources and quick response to demands simultaneously. We intend to bridge the existing gap between theory and real industrial scheduling assumptions (e.g., hot metal rolling industry, chemical and pharmaceutical industries). We adapt and evaluate a well-known algorithm based on electromagnetic science. The motivation behind our proposed meta-heuristic approach has arisen from the attraction-repulsion mechanism of electromagnetic theories in physics. In this basic idea, we desire to bring our search closer to a region with a superior objective function while going away from the region with the inferior objective function in order to move the solution gradually towards optimality. The algorithm is carefully evaluated for its performance against two existing algorithms using multi-objective performance measures and statistical tools. The results show that our proposed solution method outperforms the others.

Air defense is a crucial area for all naval combat systems. In this study, we consider a warship equipped with an air-defense weapon that targets incoming threats using surface-to-air missiles. We define the weapon scheduling problem as the optimal scheduling of a set of surface-to-air missiles of a warship to a set of attacking air threats. The optimal scheduling of the weapon results in an increase in the probability of successful targeting of all incoming threats. We develop a heuristic method to obtain a very fast and acceptable solution for the problem. In addition, a branch and bound algorithm is developed to find the optimal solution. In order to increase the efficiency of this algorithm, a lower bound, an upper bound and a set of dominance rules have been developed. Using randomly generated test problems, the performance of the proposed solution approaches is analyzed. The results indicate that in all practical situations, the branch-and-bound algorithm is able to solve the problem optimally in less than a second.