A Simulated Annealing-Based Heuristic Algorithm for Job Shop Scheduling to Minimize Lateness

A decomposition-based optimization algorithm is proposed for solving large job shop scheduling problems with the objective of minimizing the maximum lateness. First, we use the constraint propagation theory to derive the orientation of a portion of disjunctive arcs. Then we use a simulated annealing algorithm to find a decomposition policy which satisfies the maximum number of oriented disjunctive arcs. Subsequently, each subproblem (corresponding to a subset of operations as determined by the decomposition policy) is successively solved with a simulated annealing algorithm, which leads to a feasible solution to the original job shop scheduling problem. Computational experiments are carried out for adapted benchmark problems, and the results show the proposed algorithm is effective and efficient in terms of solution quality and time performance