Local adjustments: A general algorithm

Processing a set of operations on a single processor that can handle at most one job at a time is an underlying issue of many combinatorial optimization problems, and especially classical scheduling problems, such as job-shops, flow-shops and other X-shops. The main goal of local operations is to narrow the time-windows of operations for that kind of disjunctive scheduling problem. In this paper, we investigate the properties of local adjustments and provide a unified and efficient framework for the combination of the main adjustment procedures. Beyond its rapid prototyping feature, our implementation is proved to guarantee a good stability property that finally leads to a better convergence process. Computational experiments on single machine and on job-shop scheduling problems are reported.