We consider job shop scheduling problems with release and due-dates, as well as various tardiness objectives. To date, no efficient general-purpose heuristics have been developed for these problems. genetic algorithms can be applied almost directly, but come along with apparent weaknesses.

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 ...