The strategies and parameters of tabu search for job-shop scheduling

This paper presents a tabu search approach for the job-shop scheduling problem. Although the problem is NP-hard, satisfactory solutions have been obtained recently by tabu search. However, tabu search has a problem-speci®c and parametric structure. Therefore, in the paper, we focussed on the tabu search strategies and parameters such as initial solution, neighborhood structure, tabu list, aspiration criterion, elite solutions list, intensi®cation, diversi®cation and the number of iteration. In order to compare some neighborhood strategies and tabu list length methods, a computational study is done on the benchmark problems.