A heuristic algorithm for the job shop scheduling problem

Abstract

The job shop scheduling problem that is concerned with minimizing makespan is discussed. A new heuristic algorithm that embeds an improved shifting bottleneck procedure into the Tabu Search (TS) technique is presented. This algorithm is different from the previous procedures, because the improved shifting bottleneck procedure is a new procedure for the problem, and the two remarkable strategies of intensification and diversification of TS are modified. In addition, a new kind of neighborhood structure is defined and the method for local search is different from the previous. This algorithm has been tested on many common problem benchmarks with various sizes and levels of hardness and compared with several other algorithms. Computational experiments show that this algorithm is one of the most effective and efficient algorithms for the problem. Especially, it obtains a lower upbound for an instance with size of 50 jobs and 20 machines within a short period. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2004.