A new approach to job shop scheduling problems with due date constraints considering operation subcontracts

We consider a kind of job shop scheduling problems with due-date constraints, where temporal relaxation of machine capacity constraint is possible through subcontracts. In practice, this kind of problem is frequently found in manufacturing industries where outsourcing of manufacturing operation is possible through subcontract. We present a heuristic algorithm that addresses the problem by solving a series of smaller subproblems to optimality. For the sake of efficiency, the algorithm repeatedly executes in two steps – (1) improving the sequence of operations and (2) picking out the operations to be subcontracted – on bottleneck machines. Experiments are conducted for example problems, and the result of the experiment confirms the viability of the suggested algorithm.