Job shop scheduling by simulated annealing
Operations Research
Applying tabu search to the job-shop scheduling problem
Annals of Operations Research - Special issue on Tabu search
Insertion techniques for the heuristic solution of the job shop problem
Proceedings of the workshop on Discrete algorithms
A fast taboo search algorithm for the job shop problem
Management Science
Guided Local Search with Shifting Bottleneck for Job Shop Scheduling
Management Science
Tabu Search
Performance of Various Computers Using Standard Linear Equations Software
Performance of Various Computers Using Standard Linear Equations Software
An Advanced Tabu Search Algorithm for the Job Shop Problem
Journal of Scheduling
A hybrid particle swarm optimization for job shop scheduling problem
Computers and Industrial Engineering
A very fast TS/SA algorithm for the job shop scheduling problem
Computers and Operations Research
Parallel Simulated Annealing for the Job Shop Scheduling Problem
ICCS '09 Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computational Science: Part I
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
On single-walk parallelization of the job shop problem solving algorithms
Computers and Operations Research
Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence
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Examination of the job-shop scheduling literature uncovers a striking trend. As methods for the deterministic job-shop problem have gradually improved over the years, they have come to rely on neighbourhoods for selecting moves that are more and more constrained. We document this phenomenon by focusing on the approach of Nowicki and Smutnicki (Management Science, 1996, 42(6), 797–813), noted for proposing and implementing the most restrictive neighbourhood in the literature. The Nowicki and Smutnicki (NS) method which exploits its neighbourhood by a tabu search strategy, is widely recognised as the most effective procedure for obtaining high quality solutions in a relatively short time. Accordingly, we analyse the contribution of the method's neighbourhood structure to its overall effectiveness. Our findings show, surprisingly, that the NS neighbourhood causes the method's choice of an initialisation procedure to have an important influence on the best solution the method is able to find. By contrast, the method's choice of a strategy to generate a critical path has a negligible influence. Empirical testing further discloses that over 99.7% of the moves chosen from this neighborhood (by the NS rules) are disimproving—regardless of the initial solution procedure or the critical path generation procedure employed. We discuss implications of these findings for developing new and more effective job-shop algorithms.