Simulation-Based Selection of Machine Criticality Measures for a Shifting Bottleneck Heuristic

In this paper, we investigate the influence of several machine criticality measures on the performance of a shifting bottleneck heuristic for complex job shops. The shifting bottleneck heuristic is a decomposition approach that tackles the overall scheduling problem by solving a sequence of tool group scheduling problems and composes the overall solution by using a disjunctive graph. Machine criticality measures are responsible for the sequence of the considered tool group scheduling problems. We suggest a new machine criticality measure that is a weighted sum of several existing criticality measures. It turns out that the shifting bottleneck heuristic performs well compared to dispatching rules when the suggested criticality measure is used. We present the results of computational experiments