A hybridization of simulated annealing and electromagnetism-like mechanism for a periodic job shop scheduling problem

In this paper, we present on a periodic job shop scheduling problem (PJSSP) based on the periodic event scheduling problem (PESP), which is different from cyclic scheduling. The PESP schedules a number of recurring events, such that each pair of events fulfills certain constraints during a given time period. To solve such a hard PJSS problem, we propose a hybrid algorithm, namely EM–SA, which is based on electromagnetism-like mechanism (EM) and simulated annealing (SA). To evaluate this proposed EM– SA, some randomly constructed instances are solved, and the related results are compared with SA and optimum solutions obtained by the branch-and-bound (B&B) algorithm. The results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed hybrid EM–SA algorithm to solve the PJSSP. 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd.