Evolving "less-myopic" scheduling rules for dynamic job shop scheduling with genetic programming

Job Shop Scheduling (JSS) is a complex real-world problem aiming to optimise a measure of delivery speed or customer satisfaction by determining a schedule for processing jobs on machines. A major disadvantage of using a dispatching rule (DR) approach to solving JSS problems is their lack of a global perspective of the current and potential future state of the shop. We investigate a genetic programming based hyper-heuristic (GPHH) approach to develop "less-myopic" DRs for dynamic JSS. Results show that in the dynamic ten machine job shop, incorporating features of the state of the wider shop, and the stage of a job's journey through the shop, improves the mean performance, and decreases the standard deviation of performance of the best evolved rules.

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