Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2025

Understanding the Impact of Value Selection Heuristics in Scheduling Problems

Résumé

It has been observed that value selection heuristics have less impact than other heuristic choices when solving hard combinatorial optimization (CO) problems. It is often thought that this is because more time is spent on unsatisfiable sub-problems where the value ordering is irrelevant. In this paper we investigate this belief in the scheduling domain and come up with a more detailed explanation. We find that, even though there are less relevant choices to be made on hard instances, each mistake tends to have a bigger impact, to a point where the potential gain from a value heuristic predominates. Moreover, we observe two interesting and relatively surprising phenomena when solving scheduling problems. First, the accuracy of a given value selection heuristic decreases with the optimality gap. Second, the computational penalty of a mistake increases with the accuracy of the heuristic. For the first observation, we argue that on hard problems, constraint propagation removes a large portion of choices that align with the intuition behind the heuristic. This means that the heuristic faces mostly difficult choices. For the second observation, we argue that simple heuristics tend to make more mistakes on intuitive choice points, and the computational cost for refuting these mistakes is smaller than for those made by a more accurate heuristic.

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DOI

Cite 10.1287/ijoc.3.2.149 Autre Applegate, D., & Cook, W. (1991). A Computational Study of the Job-Shop Scheduling Problem. ORSA Journal on Computing, 3(2), 149–156. https://doi.org/10.1287/ijoc.3.2.149

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DOI

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JSTL instances (Caumond–Lacomme–Tchernev)
DOI

Cite 10.1016/S0377-2217(96)00170-1 Autre Kolisch, R., & Sprecher, A. (1997). PSPLIB - A project scheduling problem library. European Journal of Operational Research, 96(1), 205–216. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0377-2217(96)00170-1

PSPLIB (Kolisch & Sprecher)

Dates et versions

hal-05226755 , version 1 (27-08-2025)

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Tim Luchterhand, Emmanuel Hebrard, Sylvie Thiébaux. Understanding the Impact of Value Selection Heuristics in Scheduling Problems. International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP-25), Aug 2025, Glasgow, United Kingdom. ⟨10.4230/LIPIcs.CP.2025.27⟩. ⟨hal-05226755⟩
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