A lower bound for weighted completion time variance

We consider a single machine scheduling problem to minimize the weighted completion time variance. This problem is known to be NP-hard. We propose a heuristic and a lower bound based on job splitting and the Viswanathkumar and Srinivasan procedure. The test on more than 2000 instances shows that this lower bound is very tight and the heuristic yields solutions very close to optimal ones since the gap between the solution given by the heuristic and the lower bound is very small. (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier B.V.