Efficiency of metaheuristics to schedule general flexible job-shop

Abstract

We consider a flexible job-shop which is quite general because characterized by
several constraints. The jobs are made of a set of operations in a given order; each job
can have a ready date and due date. There exist intervals delay time (i.e. a minimal
and maximal acceptable delay) between two successive operations of a same job. Each
machine is able to process particular operations of the jobs, with different productivity.
The machines are connected in a given configuration defining some possible routings
for each job. For each machine, there are set-up times depending of two successive
operations. Some others constraints like shared resources, maintenance periods of
the machines, waiting stocks can also be taken into account. A general methodology
using metaheuristics is proposed to generate a good feasible schedule for such complex model and illustrated by an example.