An iterative refining mechanism for general job shop scheduling problems

This paper addresses the general job shop scheduling problem with the objective as how to increase the meet-due-date rate. An iterative schedule refining mechanism is proposed, which iteratively adjusts the estimation of the remaining processing times of jobs in a dynamic and stage-specific manner. The refining mechanism is applied to a recently proposed sequencing heuristic and the integrated approach shows satisfactory performance through a comprehensive simulation study. Besides, we also show that the proposed refining mechanism can bring much improvement to several conventional rules.