Evolutionary Computation Applications F1.5 Scheduling

Over the past few years, a continually increasing number of research efforts have investigated the application of evolutionary computation techniques for the solution of scheduling problems. Scheduling problems can pose extremely complex combinatorial optimization problems. The necessity to satisfy various kinds of constraint makes the scheduling task even more difficult. The major portion of this section is devoted to a comprehensive overview of evolutionary computation research on scheduling. The approaches are discussed with respect to the kind of solution representation used. Evolutionary computation seems to be especially well suited for scheduling tasks where a high-quality schedule must be generated in a limited time.