On Neighborhood Structures and Repair Techniques for Blocking Job Shop Scheduling Problems

Abstract

The job shop scheduling problem with blocking constraints and total tardiness minimization represents a challenging combinatorial optimization problem of high relevance in production planning and logistics. Since general-purpose solution approaches struggle with finding even feasible solutions, a permutation-based heuristic method is proposed here, and the applicability of basic scheduling-tailored mechanisms is discussed. The problem is tackled by a local search framework, which relies on interchange- and shift-based operators. Redundancy and feasibility issues require advanced transformation and repairing schemes. An analysis of the embedded neighborhoods shows beneficial modes of implementation on the one hand and structural difficulties caused by the blocking constraints on the other hand. The applied simulated annealing algorithm generates good solutions for a wide set of benchmark instances. The computational results especially highlight the capability of the permutation-based method in constructing feasible schedules of valuable quality for instances of critical size and support future research on hybrid solution techniques.

Special Issue on Exact and Heuristic Scheduling Algorithms

“…The paper [2] is devoted to the heuristic solution of job shop scheduling problems with blocking constraints and minimization of total tardiness. This problem has many applications in manufacturing, but also in railway scheduling.…”

Evaluation of VaR and CVaR for the makespan in interval valued blocking job shops

“…The problem is NP-Hard and its modeling and theoretical basis have been outlined in the literature [23,38]. The relevance of the BJSS from both an application and an academic point of view has motivated numerous algorithmic contributions in recent decades (e.g., see [3,30,40,43,47,48]). In general, these algorithmic approaches are designed for environments in which the timing attributes (i.e., setups, release and processing times) of the problem are assumed to be deterministic.…”

“…Regarding the constraints introduced in Section 3, following [30], we introduce for each job j ∈ J a release time r j randomly extracted from a uniform distribution as in Equation (11), where p ji is the processing time of operation o ji of job j on the required machine i.…”

Mathematical Model and Evaluation Function for Conflict-Free Warranted Makespan Minimization of Mixed Blocking Constraint Job-Shop Problems

“…Very recently, a paper has been published about neighborhood structures and repair techniques for RSb blocking jobshop scheduling problems with the Total Tardiness minimization criteria, where the concept of feasibility guarantee is noticeably also addressed [37]. The authors used list index to check and retrieve the feasibility of a blocking jobshop schedule given by a single list of operations, and chose a simulated annealing algorithm to perform their experiments.…”