Ant Colony Optimization is a relatively new meta-heuristic that has proven its quality and versatility on various combinatorial optimization problems such as the traveling salesman problem, the vehicle routing problem and the job shop scheduling problem.(...)

TWe perform a novel analysis of the fitness landscape of thejob-shop scheduling problem (JSP). In contrast to other well-known combinatorial optimization problems, we show that the landscape of the JSP is non-regular, in that the connectivity of solutions is variable.

This article conducts a computational study for the Job Shop Scheduling Problem. The focus lies on the structure of the search space as it appears for local search.

A general model for job shop scheduling is described which applies to static, dynamic and non-deterministic production environments. Next, a Genetic Algorithm is presented which solves the job shop scheduling problem ...