A genetic algorithm for job shop scheduling with limited part-changing times

While many variations of JSSP have been extensively studied, JSSP with limited part-changing times has rarely been explored. However, JSSP with limited part-changing times may find its applications in many manufacturing factories (Part-changing refers to changing some parts of a machine so that the machine can process different types of jobs. Since part-changing is usually carried out by labours, the total part-changing times in a unit time is thus limited). In this paper, we propose a genetic algorithm, MJGA, for this type of JSSP. Since we have seen no early work on this problem, for testing the performance of MJGA, we also propose another two algorithms and compare them with MJGA. Experiments show that MJGA performs better for solving this schedule problem, especially when the instance is getting larger.