Solving the Job-Shop Scheduling Problem by Arena Simulation Software

The job-Shop Scheduling problem (JSSP) attracted a lot of researchers from various research disciplines, mainly Operations Research, Management Science, Computer Science, and Manufacture Science for the last 50 years. JSSP is a typical NP-hard problem in the strong sense. Although the literature is full of researches concerning the JSSP, practitioners are not able to get benefit of the majority of these researches because of the assumptions which take the problem very far away from the real life JSSP. The aim of our research is to build a simulation model for the JSSP to be able to relax some of these assumptions to simulate the real life JSSP. We used discrete event simulation as it's suitable for the JSSP. We used Arena simulation software version 14 to build the model on a Dell® Vostro PC (Intel® Core(TM) i5–2400 CPU @ 3.10GHZ with 4 GB RAM).In this paper we will just show the basic model which is able to solve the famous benchmarks for the JSSP to prove that our model is ready for the real life JSSP. In the following papers we will show how to relax some of these assumptions one by one. The computational results for 9 benchmarks of different sizes showed that the proposed model is both effective and efficient. It gave good solutions in reasonable amounts of time.