An effective hybrid optimization strategy for job-shop scheduling problems

Abstract Simulated annealing is a naturally serial algorithm, but its behavior can be controlled by the cooling schedule. Genetic algorithm exhibits implicit parallelism and can retain useful redundant information about what is learned from previous searches by its representation in individuals in the population, but GA may lose solutions and substructures due to the disruptive effects of genetic operators and is not easy to regulate GA's convergence. By reasonably combining these two global probabilistic search algorithms, we develop a general, parallel and easily implemented hybrid optimization framework, and apply it to job-shop scheduling problems. Based on effective encoding scheme and some specific optimization operators, some benchmark job-shop scheduling problems are well solved by the hybrid optimization strategy, and the results are competitive with the best literature results. Besides the effectiveness and robustness of the hybrid strategy, the combination of different search mechanisms and structures can relax the parameter-dependence of GA and SA. Scope and purpose Job-shop scheduling problem (JSP) is one of the most well-known machine scheduling problems and one of the strongly NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. Developing effective search methods is always an important and valuable work. The scope and purpose of this paper is to present a parallel and easily implemented hybrid optimization framework, which reasonably combines genetic algorithm with simulated annealing. Based on effective encoding scheme and some specific optimization operators, the job-shop scheduling problems are well solved by the hybrid optimization strategy.