Constraint Satisfaction for Multiple Capacitated Job Shop Scheduling

We introduce the multiple capacitated job shop scheduling problem as a generalization of the job shop scheduling problem. In this problem machines may process several operations simultaneously. We present an algorithm based on constraint satisfaction techniques to handle the problem e ectively. The most important novel feature of our algorithm is the consistency checking. An empirical performance analysis is performed using a well-known set of instances of the job shop scheduling problem and a newly constructed set of instances of the multiple capacitated job shop scheduling problem. We show that our algorithm performs well for both sets of instances.