This paper deals with multi-operation models, which are different from the flow shop and job shop models. In the flow shop or job shop models, the routes of all jobs are known in advance. In practice, the route of the job is often immaterial and up to the scheduler to decide. When the routes of the jobs are open, the model is referred to as an open shop. This paper describes the development of ...

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...

The partially-concurrent open shop scheduling problem is presented. The standard open shop scheduling problem is generalized by allowing some operations to be processed concurrently. This generalization is directly motivated from a real-life timetabling project of assigning technicians to airplanes in an airplane garage. A schedule for the partially-concurrent problem is represented by a digrap...

An interesting research area is to solve scheduling problems using network flow models and algorithms. Most of the existing papers in this research area deal with scheduling problems with parallel machines (identical and / or uniform machines). This paper considers the specialized case and develops network flow models and algorithms to solve open shop and flow and job shop problems.

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...

This is a summary of the journal article (Malapert et al. 2012) published by Journal on Computing entitled “An Optimal Constraint Programming Approach to the Open-Shop Problem”. The article presents an optimal constraint programming approach for the Open-Shop scheduling problem, which integrates recent constraint propagation and branching techniques with new upper bound heuristics. Randomized r...

We consider the open shop, job shop, and ow shop scheduling problems with integral processing times. We give polynomial-time algorithms to determine if an instance has a schedule of length at most 3, and show that deciding if there is a schedule of length at most 4 is N P-complete. The latter result implies that, unless P = N P, there does not exist a polynomial-time approximation algorithm for...

This paper deals with the cyclic scheduling of flexible job-shop with time window constraints and resource capacity constraints. For time window constraints, the duration for processing products on machines and the duration for translating products from one machine to another by transfers are taken into account; for the resource capacity constraints, the confined operation space of machines and...