A survey of hybrid metaheuristics to minimize makespan of job shop scheduling problem

To develop effective, efficient scheduling methods is an important interdisciplinary challenge for any enterprise to sustain in a competitive position of fast changing markets. The goal of scheduling is to optimize different criteria of a facility such as makespan, mean flow time, resource idle time, total tardiness, number of tardy jobs/projects, in-process inventory cost, cost of being late etc. As problem size increases, performance decreases and finding optimal solution to this problem within reasonable time under some constraints turns this problem NP-Hard. Brute force algorithm normally fails to find optimum solution for large problem size and hence approximate solutions are proposed for near optimal value for given objective criterion. This paper presents a brief survey on hybrid metaheuristics for solving job shop problem for minimizing the makespan.