An agent-based parallel approach for the job shop scheduling problem with genetic algorithms

The job shop scheduling problem is one of the most important and complicated problems in machine scheduling. This problem is characterized as NP-hard. The high complexity of the problem makes it hard to find the optimal solution within reasonable time in most cases. Hence searching for approximate solutions in polynomial time instead of exact solutions at high cost is preferred for difficult instances of the problem. Meta-heuristic methods such as genetic algorithms are widely applied to find optimal or near-optimal solutions for the job shop scheduling problem. Parallelizing the genetic algorithms is one of the best approaches that can be used to enhance the performance of these algorithms. In this paper, we propose an agent-based parallel approach for the problem in which creating the initial population and parallelizing the genetic algorithm are carried out in an agent-based manner. Benchmark instances are used to investigate the performance of the proposed approach. The results show that this approach improves the efficiency.