No-wait and blocking job-shops: challenging problems for GA´s

This paper deals with the resolution of no-wait and blocking job-shop scheduling problems. A genetic algorithm is proposed as the main procedure to deal with these complex (NP-complete) problems. Decoding techniques to use in the algorithm are proposed as the main contributions of this research. The decoding techniques ensure no violation of the no-wait and blocking conditions, i.e. they always produce feasible solutions. Numerical experiments on some classical benchmark problems are performed in order to show the effectiveness of the method