Efficiency of metaheuristics to schedule general flexible job-shop

We consider a flexible job-shop which is quite general because characterized by several constraints. The jobs are made of a set of operations in a given order; each job can have a ready date and due date. There exist intervals delay time (i.e., a minimal and maximal acceptable delay) between two successive operations of a same job. Each machine is able to process particular operations of the jobs, with different productivity. The machines are connected in a given configuration defining some possible routings for each job. For each machine, there are set-up times depending on two successive operations. Some other constraints like shared resources, maintenance periods of the machines, waiting stocks can also be taken into account. A general methodology using metaheuristics is proposed to generate a good feasible schedule for such complex model and illustrated by an example.