Article ID: | iaor20113928 |
Volume: | 212 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 22 |
End Page Number: | 32 |
Publication Date: | Jul 2011 |
Journal: | European Journal of Operational Research |
Authors: | Branke Juergen, Pickardt Christoph W |
Keywords: | evolutionary algorithms, job shop, dispatching |
An evolutionary algorithm is developed to generate job shop problem instances for which an examined dispatching rule fails to achieve a good solution due to a single suboptimal decision. These instances can be easily analysed to reveal limitations of that rule which helps with the design of better rules. The method is applied to a job shop problem from the literature, resulting in new best dispatching rules for the mean flow time measure. Dispatching rules are simple scheduling heuristics that are widely applied in industrial practice. Their popularity can be attributed to their ability to flexibly react to shop floor disruptions that are prevalent in many real‐world manufacturing environments. However, it is a challenging and time‐consuming task to design local, decentralised dispatching rules that result in a good global performance of a complex shop.