A Constructive Heuristic for Automated Parallel Tests Assembly

Abstract

Parallel tests contain different items but have the same measurement properties. They are administered at the same or different time slots and their measurement results must be comparable. The problem of automated parallel tests assembly is studied for a long time, and many (mostly improvement) heuristic solutions are proposed and elaborated in literature. Such approaches frequently suffer from algorithms of unpredictable execution time, forcing the methods to terminate execution when some time limit or solution quality is reached. This paper proposes an efficient method of polynomial complexity, as a complete solution to the automated parallel tests assembly problem. The method uses the idea of Nawaz, Enscore, and Ham constructive heuristic algorithm to reduce the number of examined permutations, originally exploited for solving the permutation flow-shop sequencing problem. We compared the experimental results of the proposed method with two methods based on improvement heuristics that solve the same problem formulation, simulated annealing and variable neighborhood search. The main advantages of the proposed method are predictable execution time and implementation simplicity. Achieved quality of assembled tests, combined with predictable test assembly execution time, may be of particular interest in cases when computational resources for test assembly and administering are overloaded.