An iterated greedy metaheuristic for the blocking job shop scheduling problem

In this paper we consider a job shop scheduling problem with blocking (zero buffer) constraints. Blocking constraints model the absence of buffers, whereas in the traditional job shop scheduling model buffers have infinite capacity. There are two known variants of this problem, namely the blocking job shop scheduling (BJSS) with swap allowed and the BJSS with no-swap. A swap is needed when there is a cycle of two or more jobs each waiting for the machine occupied by the next job in the cycle. Such a cycle represents a deadlock in no-swap BJSS, while with a swap all the jobs in the cycle move simultaneously to their subsequent machine. This scheduling problem is receiving an increasing interest in the recent literature, and we propose an Iterated Greedy (IG) algorithm to solve both variants of the problem. The IG is a metaheuristic based on the repetition of a destruction phase, which removes part of the solution, and a construction phase, in which a new solution is obtained by applying an underlying greedy algorithm starting from the partial solution. Comparison with recent published results shows that the iterated greedy outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms on benchmark instances. Moreover it is conceptually easy to implement and has a broad applicability to other constrained scheduling problems.