GASA-JOSH: A Hybrid Evolutionary-Annealing Approach for Job-Shop Scheduling Problem

The job-shop scheduling problem is well known for its complexity as an NP-hard problem. We have considered JSSPs with an objective of minimizing makespan. In this paper, we develope a hybrid approach for solving JSSPs called GASA-JOSH. In GASA-JOSH, the population is divided in non-cooperative groups. Each group must refer to a method pool and choose genetic algorithm or simulated annealing to solve the problem. The best result of each group is maintained in a solution set, and then the best solution to the whole population is chosen among the elements of the solution set and reported as outcome. The proposed approach have been compared with other algorithms for job-shop scheduling and evaluated with satisfactory results on a large set of JSSPs derived from classical job-shop scheduling benchmarks. We have solved 23 benchmark problems and compared results obtained with a number of algorithms established in the literature.