A general approach for optimizing regular criteria in the job-shop scheduling problem

Even though a very large number of solution methods has been developed for the jobshop scheduling problem, the majority are designed for the makespan criterion. In this paper, we propose a general approach for optimizing any regular criterion in the job-shop scheduling problem. The approach is a local search method that uses a disjunctive graph model and neighborhoods generated by swapping critical arcs. The connectivity property of the neighborhood structure is proved and a novel efficient method for evaluating moves is presented. Besides its generality, another prominent advantage of the proposed approach is its simple implementation that requires only one parameter to tune. Extensive computational experiments carried out on makespan, total weighted flow time, total weighted tardiness and weighted sum of tardy jobs, show the efficiency of the proposed approach. Best results were obtained for some instances of the literature.