Application of Machine Assignment in Solving the Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem

The flexible job shop scheduling problem is one of the most difficult production scheduling problems in industry. This paper presents a two-step approach to solve this problem. First, based on a new concept of dispersion, all the operations are disputed to the machines such that each operation is processed by a certain machine which means that the problem becomes the job shop scheduling problem. Then, the improved shifting bottleneck procedure is proposed to solve the job shop scheduling problem. Our approach is tested on many common benchmarks and is compared with several lately algorithms. The computational experiments show that this new approach is not only effective and efficient, but quite better than the classic genetic algorithms as well.