Practical job shop scheduling

Abstract

The Shifting Bottleneck procedure is an intuitive and reasonably good approximation algorithm for the notoriously difficult classical job shop scheduling problem. The principle of decomposing a classical job shop problem into a series of single-machine problems can also easily be applied to job shop problems with practical features, such as transportation times, simultaneous resource requirements, setup times, and many minor but important other characteristics. We report on the continuous research in the area of extending the Shifting Bottleneck procedure to deal with those practical features. We call job shops with such additional features practical job shops. We discuss experiences with the Shifting Bottleneck procedure in a number of practical cases