AN EFFECTIVE HEURISTIC METHOD FOR GENERALIZED JOB-SHOP SCHEDULING WITH DUE-DATES

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the generalized job shop scheduling problem with due dates wherein the objective is to minimize total job tardiness. An efficient heuristic algorithm called the revised exchange heuristic algorithm (REHA) is presented for solving this problem. It has been shown that the algorithm can be completed in polynomial time. Results, generated over a range of shop sizes with different due date tightness levels, indicate that the proposed technique is capable of yielding notable reductions in total tardiness (over initial schedules) for practical size problems. This suggests that this approach is an efficient scheduling option for this class of complex optimization problems.