Algorithm based on taboo search and shifting bottleneck for job shop scheduling

In this paper, a computational effective heuristic method for solving the minimum makespan problem of job shop scheduling is presented. It is based on taboo search procedure and on the shifting bottleneck procedure used to jump out of the trap of the taboo search procedure. A key point of the algorithm is that in the taboo search procedure two taboo lists are used to forbid two kinds of reversals of arcs, which is a new and effective way in taboo search methods for job shop scheduling. Computational experiments on a set of benchmark problem instances show that, in several cases, the approach, in reasonable time, yields better solutions than the other heuristic procedures discussed in the literature.