Extending the shifting bottleneck procedure to real-life applications

Much research has been devoted to the job shop scheduling problem since its introduction in the late 50's. Despite these efforts, even moderate sized benchmarking problems remained unsolved for many years. Given the complexity of the job shop scheduling problem, there is little hope for solving large real-life problems optimally within reasonable time. We therefore rely on heuristics, of which the shifting bottleneck procedure, developed by Adams et al., is performing excellently. We examine several extensions of the shifting bottleneck procedure towards real-life applications. We introduce due dates, release dates, assembly structures, split structures, overlapping operations, setup times, transportation times, parallel machines and beginning inventory. This generalized shifting bottleneck procedure is compared with priority dispatching rules on a set of large test problems.