Job shop scheduling problems play an important role in both manufacturing systems and industrial process for improving the utilization of resources, and therefore it is crucial to develop efficient scheduling technologies. The Job shop scheduling problem, one of the best known production scheduling problems, has been proved to be NP-hard. In this paper, we present a parallel and agent-based loc...

A Job-Shop Scheduling is a process–organized manufacturing facility. Its main characteristics are that a great diversity of jobs is performed. A Job-Shop produces goods (parts) and these parts have one or more alternatives process plans. Each process plan consists of a sequence of a operations and these operations require resources and have certain (predefined) duration on machines. The Job-Sho...

In this paper we present a linear time approximation scheme for the job shop scheduling problem with fixed number of machines and fixed number of operations per job. This improves on the previously best 2 + ǫ, ǫ > 0, approximation algorithm for the problem by Shmoys, Stein, and Wein. Our approximation scheme is very general and it can be extended to the case of job shop scheduling problems with...

This paper deals with the Job Shop scheduling problem with constraints of minimum and maximum Time Lags (JSTL). This problem is an extension of the job shop scheduling problem, with additional constraints of minimum and maximum time lags existing between successive operations of the same job. In this work, we investigate Parallel Tabu Searches implemented by competitive agents for the Job Shop ...

Meeting due dates is the most important goal of scheduling if the due date of each job has been promised to its customer. This paper considers the job-shop scheduling problem of minimizing the total holding cost of completed and in-process products subject to no tardy jobs. A heuristic algorithm based on the shifting bottleneck procedure is proposed for solving the minimum total holding cost pr...

Job shop scheduling problem is one of the most important problems in the combinatorial optimization problems and it is applied to various fields about engineering. Many works have been reported for this problem using Genetic Algorithm (GA). The GA is one of the most powerful optimization methods based on the mechanics of natural evolution. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for the job s...

The job shop scheduling is an important and complex problem for a manufacturing system. It is well known and popular problem having (Non-Polynomial) NP-hard characteristic to find the optimal or near optimal solution (schedules) quickly. In job shop scheduling a set of “N” number of jobs are processed through an “M” number of given set of machines. It must be processed in the prescribed order b...

This paper gives the positive answer to the question posed in the title for a wide class of minimization criteria including the maximum completion time, maximum lateness , total completion time, total weighted completion time, total tardiness, total weighted tardiness, number of late jobs and the weighted number of late jobs. That is any scheduling problem for m identical parallel machines to m...

The indeterministic multi-layer job-shop scheduling problem, which is the extension of the traditional job-shop scheduling, is introduced in this paper. The framework and some key issues of the problem are discussed. A multi-agent reinforcement learning approach, named memory-evolution-based MAS reinforcement learning algorithm, is breifly introduced too. Experiment results show that our approa...