Scheduling is an important process widely used in manufacturing, production, management, computer science, and so on. Appropriate scheduling can reduce material handling costs and time. Finding good schedules for given sets of jobs can thus help factory supervisors effectively control job flows and provide solutions for job sequencing. In simple flow shop problems, each machine operation center...

The Flexible Job Shop problem is a generalization of the classical job shop scheduling problem in which for every operation there is a group of machines that can process it. The problem is to assign operations to machines and to order the operations on the machines so that the operations can be processed in the smallest amount of time. This models a wide variety of problems encountered in real ...

In this paper we consider a generalized version of the classical preemptive open shop problem with sum of weighted job completion times objective. The main result is a (2 + ε)-approximation algorithm for this problem. In the last section we also discuss the possibility of improving our algorithm.

Many problems in industry are a form of open-shop scheduling problem (OSSP). We describe a hybrid approach to this problem which combines a Genetic Algorithm (GA) with simple heuristic schedule building rules. Excellent performance is found on some benchmark OSS problems, including improvements on previous best-known results. We describe how our approach can be simply amended to deal with the m...