A GRASP algorithm to solve the problem of dependent tasks scheduling in different machines

Abstract

Industrial planning has experienced notable advancements since its beginning by the middle of the 20th century. The importance of its application within the several industries where it is used has been demonstrated, regardless of the difficulty of the design of the exact algorithms that solve the variants. Heuristic methods have been applied for planning problems due to their high complexity; especially Artificial Intelligence when developing new strategies to solve one of the most important variants called task scheduling. It is possible to define task scheduling as: a set of N production line tasks and M machines, which can execute those tasks, where the goal is to find an execution order that minimizes the accumulated execution time, known as makespan. This paper presents a GRASP meta heuristic strategy for the problem of scheduling dependent tasks in different machines. © 2006 International Federation for Information Processing.