Discrete optimization with polynomially detectable boundaries and restricted level sets

The paper describes an optimization procedure for a class of discrete optimization problems which is defined by certain properties of the boundary of the feasible region and level sets of the objective function. It is shown that these properties are possessed, for example, by various scheduling problems, including a number of well known NP-hard problems which play an important role in scheduling theory. For one of these problems the presented optimization procedure is compared with a version of the branch-and-bound algorithm by means of computational experiments. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC