Job-Shop Scheduling Using Timed Automata

In this paper we show how the classical job shop scheduling problem can be modeled as a special class of acyclic timed automata Finding an optimal schedule corresponds then to nding a shortest in terms of elapsed time path in the timed automaton This representa tion provides new techniques for solving the optimization problem and more importantly it allows to model naturally more complex dynamic resource allocation problems which are not captured so easily in tradi tional models of operation research We present several algorithms and heuristics for nding the shortest paths in timed automata and test their implementation in the tool Kronos on numerous benchmark examples