Improving heuristic estimations with constraint propagation in searching for optimal schedules

We face the Job Shop Scheduling Problem by means of branch and bound and A ∗ search. Our main contribution is a new method, based on constraint propagation rules, that allows improving the heuristic estimations. We report results from an experimental study across conventional instances with differen...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Mencía Cascallana, Carlos|||0000-0001-7361-5709, Sierra Sánchez, María Rita|||0000-0002-4884-5243, Varela Arias, José Ramiro|||0000-0002-1610-1792
Format: book part
Publication Date:2009
Country:España
Institution:Universidad de Oviedo (UNIOVI)
Repository:RUO. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Oviedo
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:digibuo.uniovi.es:10651/34022
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10651/34022
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Job shop scheduling
Heuristic search
A* algorithm
Branch and bound
Constraint propagation
Description
Summary:We face the Job Shop Scheduling Problem by means of branch and bound and A ∗ search. Our main contribution is a new method, based on constraint propagation rules, that allows improving the heuristic estimations. We report results from an experimental study across conventional instances with different sizes showing that A ∗ takes profit from the improved estimations. Both algorithms can reach optimal solutions for medium size instances and, in this case, the branch and bound algorithm is better than A ∗ . However, for very large instances that remain unsolved in both cases, A ∗ returns much better lower bounds due to the improved estimation