A tabu search method guided by shifting bottleneck for the job shop scheduling problem

A computationally effective heuristic method for solving the minimum makespan problem of job shop scheduling is presented. The proposed local search method is based on a tabu search technique and on the shifting bottleneck procedure used to generate the initial solution and to refine the next-current solutions. Computational experiments on a standard set of problem instances show that, in several cases, our approach, in a reasonable amount of computer time, yields better results than the other heuristic procedures discussed in the literature. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.