Tabu search algorithms for job-shop problems with a single transport robot [An article from: European Journal of Operational Research]

This digital document is a journal article from European Journal of Operational Research, published by Elsevier in 2005. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
We consider a generalized job-shop problem where the jobs additionally have to be transported between the machines by a single transport robot. Besides transportation times for the jobs, empty moving times for the robot are taken into account. The objective is to determine a schedule with minimal makespan. We present local search algorithms for this problem where appropriate neighborhood structures are defined using problem-specific properties. An one-stage procedure is compared with a two-stage approach and a combination of both. Computational results are presented for test data arising from job-shop benchmark instances enlarged by transportation and empty moving times.