A hybrid evolutionary algorithm to solve the job shop scheduling problem

This paper presents a Hybrid Evolutionary Algorithm (HEA) to solve the Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSP). Incorporating a tabu search procedure into the framework of an evolutionary algorithm, the HEA embraces several distinguishing features such as a longest common sequence based recombination operator and a similarity-and-quality based replacement criterion for population updating. The HEA is able to easily generate the best-known solutions for 90 % of the tested difficult instances widely used in the literature, demonstrating its efficacy in terms of both solution quality and computational efficiency. In particular, the HEA identifies a better upper bound for two of these difficult instances.