A Hybrid Heuristic Neighborhood Algorithm for the Job Shop Scheduling Problem

A hybrid heuristic neighborhood algorithm (HHNA) is proposed for the job shop scheduling problem. The hybrid design is mainly composed of two iterative phases. Phase one aim at generating new scheduling solutions through the conditioned neighborhood swapping. An evaluation procedure is designed to judge the feasibility of a new solution. An infeasible solution will be discarded. Phase two is an improved critical path algorithm that is used to do the intensification search. The computational results demonstrate that the algorithm is highly efficiency both in solution quality and time. Moreover, the algorithm is simple and robust in implementation since it needs no special parameters to be adjusted with different sizes of the problems.