A very fast tabu search algorithm for job shop problem

Abstract

This paper deals with the classic job-shop scheduling problem with makespan criterion. Some new properties of the problem associated with blocks are presented and discussed. These properties allow us to propose a new, very fast local search procedure based on a tabu search approach. The central concepts are lower bounds for evaluations of the moves, and perturbations that guide the search to the more promising areas of solution space, where "good" solutions can be found. Computational experiments are given and compared with the results yielded by the best algorithms discussed in the literature. These results show that the algorithm proposed solves the job-shop instances with high accuracy in a very short time. The presented properties and ideas can be applied in many local search procedures.© 2005 by Kluwer Academic Publishers.