Meta-heuristic for no-wait job shops with makespan minimization

In the paper, the no-wait job shop problem with makespan minimization is considered, which is decomposed into the sequencing problem and the timetabling problem. Based on the non-delay timetabling procedure and the inverse timetabling procedure, an enhanced timetabling procedure is constructed by shifting jobs leftwards or rightwards to obtain better timetables. The two sub-problems are solved independently by traditional methods. However, a meta-heuristic algorithm MCLM (modified complete local search with memory) is presented to solve the sub-problems integrally in this paper. Experimental results show that MCLM outperforms all the existing effective algorithms for the considered problem with little more computation time.