Combined Timetabling Procedure and Complete Local Search for No-Wait Job Shop Scheduling with Total Tardiness

The strong non-deterministic polynomial-hard( NP-hard)character of job shop scheduling problem( JSSP) has been acknowledged widely and it becomes stronger when attaches the nowait constraint,which widely exists in many production processes,such as chemistry process, metallurgical process. However,compared with the massive research on traditional job shop problem,little attention has been paid on the no-wait constraint.Therefore,in this paper, we have dealt with this problem by decomposing it into two sub-problems, the timetabling and sequencing problems,in traditional frame work. A new efficient combined non-order timetabling method,coordinated with objective of total tardiness,is proposed for the timetabling problems. As for the sequencing one,we have presented a modified complete local search with memory combined by crossover operator and distance counting. The entire algorithm was tested on well-known benchmark problems and compared with several existing algorithms.Computational experiments showed that our proposed algorithm performed both effectively and efficiently.