A New Hybrid Heuristic Technique for Solving Job-shop Scheduling Problem

This paper proposes a new and efficient hybrid heuristic scheme for solving job-shop scheduling problems (JSP). A new and efficient population initialization and local search concept, based on genetic algorithms, is introduced to search the solution space and to determine the global minimum solution to the JSP problem. Simulated results imply that the proposed novel JSP method (called the PLGA algorithm) outperforms several currently used approaches. This investigation also considers a real-life job-shop scheduling system design, which optimizes the performance of the job-shop scheduling system subject to a required service level. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method is very efficient and potentially useful in solving job-shop scheduling problems.