Experimental analysis of tardiness in preemptive single machine scheduling

•Total Weighted Tardiness heuristic is extended into a metaheuristic with 4 branches.•The metaheuristic is rendered to a single branch based on the problem type.•One of the 2 branches is executed depending on the job processing time.•The branches tend to become equally accurate as the problem size is increased.•Branches outperform exact solution approaches in scheduling more than 10 jobs.