Abstract:

A modified bottleneck-based (MB) heuristic for large-scale job-shop scheduling problems with a well-defined bottleneck is suggested, which is simpler but more tailored than the shifting bottleneck (SB) procedure. In this algorithm, the bottleneck is first scheduled optimally while the non-bottleneck machines are subordinated around the solutions of the bottleneck schedule by some effective dispatching rules. Computational results indicate that the MB heuristic can achieve a better tradeoff between solution quality and computational time compared to SB procedure for medium-size problems. Furthermore, it can obtain a good solution in a short time for large-scale job- shop scheduling problems.