Schedule generation schemes for the job-shop problem with sequence-dependent setup times: dominance properties and computational analysis

TL;DR

This paper analyzes schedule generation schemes for the job-shop problem with sequence-dependent setup times, exploring dominance properties and computational performance of heuristics to improve solution quality.

Contribution

It introduces and studies dominance properties of SGSs based on semi-active, active, and non-delay schedules, enhancing heuristic methods for the problem.

Findings

SGSs improve upon previous best-known results on benchmark instances.

Proposed SGSs effectively utilize priority rules within heuristics.

Computational analysis demonstrates the efficiency of the new schemes.

Abstract

We consider the job-shop problem with sequence-dependent setup times. We focus on the formal definition of schedule generation schemes (SGSs) based on the semi-active, active, and non-delay schedule categories. We study dominance properties of the sets of schedules obtainable with each SGS. We show how the proposed SGSs can be used within single-pass and multi-pass priority rule based heuristics. We study several priority rules for the problem and provide a comparative computational analysis of the different SGSs on sets of instances taken from the literature. The proposed SGSs significantly improve previously best-known results on a set of hard benchmark instances.