《2016 Discrepancy Search for the Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem》.doc

Discrepancy Search for the Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem( Abir Ben Hmida1,2,3, Mohamed Haouari3, Marie-José Huguet1,2, Pierre Lopez1,2 1CNRS ; LAAS ; 7 avenue du colonel Roche, F-31077 Toulouse, France 2Université de Toulouse ; UPS, INSA, INP, ISAE ; LAAS ; F-31077 Toulouse, France (abenhmid@laas.fr, huguet@laas.fr, lopez@laas.fr) 3Ecole Polytechnique de Tunisie, Unité ROI, La Marsa, Tunisia (mohamed.haouari@ept.rnu.tn) ABSTRACT The Flexible Job Shop scheduling Problem (FJSP) is a generalization of the classical Job Shop Problem in which each operation must be processed on a given machine chosen among a finite subset of candidate machines. The aim is to find an allocation for each operation and to define the sequence of operations on each machine so that the resulting schedule has a minimal completion time. We propose a variant of the Climbing Discrepancy Search approach for solving this problem. We also present various neighborhood structures related to assignment and sequencing problems. We report the results of extensive computational experiments carried out on well-known benchmarks for flexible job shop scheduling. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the best-known algorithms for the FJSP on some types of benchmarks and remains comparable with them on other ones. Keywords: Scheduling, Allocation, Flexible Job Shop, Discrepancy Search, Neighborhood structures. 1. Introduction The Flexible Job Shop Problem (FJSP) is a generalization of the traditional Job Shop scheduling Problem (JSP), in which it is desired to process operations on a machine chosen among a set of available ones. Therefore, the FJSP is more computationally difficult than the JSP, since it presents a further decision level besides the sequencing one, i.e., the job assignment. Determining the job assignment requires assigning each operation on a specific machine chosen among a set of machines. This problem is known to be strongly NP-Hard even if each job has at mos