Rolling horizon scheduling in large job shops

The Virtual Factory is a job shop scheduling tool that was developed at NC State. It has been shown to provide near-optimal solutions to industrial-sized problems in seconds through comparison to a computed lower bound. It is an iterative simulation-based procedure, whose objective is minimizing maximum lateness. Like many other job shop scheduling tools, the Virtual Factory has been evaluated primarily in a transient setting, even though a rolling horizon setting is more indicative of the situation in which scheduling algorithms are used in industry. Consequently, a rolling horizon procedure has been developed with which the Virtual Factory was tested. Experimental results indicate that the Virtual Factory also performs well under these circumstances.