Evolutionary Search and the Job Shop

Book excerpt: Production scheduling dictates highly constrained mathematical models with complex and often contradicting objectives. Evolutionary algorithms can be formulated almost independently of the detailed shaping of the problems under consideration. As one would expect, a weak formulation of the problem in the algorithm comes along with a quite inefficient search. This book discusses the suitability of genetic algorithms for production scheduling and presents an approach which produces results comparable with those of more tailored optimization techniques.