A simulated annealing approach based simulation-optimisation to the dynamic job-shop scheduling problem

Abstract

In this study, we address a production scheduling problem. The scheduling problem is encountered in a job-shop production type. The production system is discrete and dynamic system in which jobs arrive continually. We introduce a simulation model (SM) to identify several situations such as machine failures, changing due dates in which scheduling rules (SRs) should be selected independently. Three SRs, i.e. the earliest due date rule (EDD), the shortest processing time first rule (SPT) and the first in first out rule (FIFO), are incorporated in a SM. A simulated annealing heuristic (SA) based simulation-optimisation approach is proposed to identify the unknown schedules in the dynamical system. In the numerical analysis, the performance of SRs and SA are compared using the simulation experiments. The objective functions minimising the mean flowtime and the mean tardiness are examined with varying levels of shop utilization and due date tightness. As an overall result, we observe that the proposed SA heuristic outperforms EDD and FIFO, the well-known SPT rule provides the best results. However, SA heuristic achieves very close results to the SPT and offers a reasonable computational burden in time-critical applications.