A two-step approach for solving the flexible job shop scheduling problem

Abstract

The flexible job shop scheduling problem is one of the most difficult production scheduling problems in industry. This paper presents a two-step approach to solve this problem. In the first step, all the operations are disputed to the machines such that each operation is processed by a certain machine which means that the problem becomes the job shop scheduling problem. In the second step, a quasi-physic and quasi-human algorithm is proposed to solve the job shop scheduling problem. Our approach is tested on several common benchmarks, and the computational experiments show that this two-step approach is quite effective and efficient. Further more, The quasi-physic and quasi-human algorithm is a new idea for solving the job scheduling problem, and it could be a very good basic procedure for designing effective and efficient heuristic algorithm by combining with other heuristic strategy for the problem.