A modified simulated annealing method for flexible job shop scheduling problem

The problem considered in this paper is an important extension of the classical job shop scheduling problem, where the same operation can be performed on more than one machine. The problem is to assign each operation to a machine and to sequence the operations on the machines, such that the makespan of a set of jobs Is minimized. A generalized job shop problem is defined in detail. A variation of the simulated annealing method is proposed and computational results are provided.