Priority Rule-Based Construction Procedure Combined with Genetic Algorithm for Flexible Job-Shop Scheduling Problem

The heuristic method we propose solves the flexible job-shop scheduling problem (FJSP) using a solution construction procedure with priority rules. FJSP is more complex than classical scheduling problems in that operations are processed on one of multiple candidate machines, one of which must be selected to get a feasible solution. The solution construction procedure with priority rules is implemented on top of the efficient existing method for solving the FJSP which consists of a genetic algorithm and a local search method. The performance of the proposed method is analyzed using various benchmark problems and it is confirmed that our proposed method outperforms the existing method on problems with particular conditions. The conditions are further investigated by applying the proposed method on newly created benchmark.