A Grasp for Job Shop Scheduling

In this paper, we describe a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) for the job shop scheduling problem (JSP). We incorporate to the conventional GRASP two new concepts: an intensification strategy and POP (Proximate Optimality Principle) in the construction phase. These two concepts were first proposed by Fleurent and Glover (1999) in the context of the quadratic assignment problem. Computational experience on a large set of standard test problems indicates that GRASP is a competitive algorithm for finding approximate solutions of the job shop scheduling problem.