An evolutionary algorithm based hyper-heuristic for the job-shop scheduling problem with no-wait constraint

In this paper, we developed an evolutionary algorithm with guided mutation (EA/G) based hyper-heuristic for solving the job-shop scheduling problem with no-wait constraint (JSPNW). The JSPNW is an extension of well-known job-shop scheduling problem subject to the constraint that no waiting time is allowed between operations for a given job. This problem is a typical NP-hard problem. The hyper-heuristic algorithm comprises of two level frameworks. In the high-level, an evolutionary algorithm is employed to explore the search space. The low-level, which is comprised of generic as well as problem-specific heuristics such as guided mutation, multi-insert points and multi-swap. EA/G is a recent addition to the class of evolutionary algorithm that can be considered as a hybridization of genetic algorithms (GAs) and estimation of distribution algorithms (EDAs), and which tries to overcome the shortcomings of both. In GAs, the location information of the solutions found so far is directly used to generate offspring. On the other hand, EDAs use global statistical information to generate new offspring. In EDAs the global statistical information is stored in the form probability vector, and a new offspring is generated by sampling this probability vector. We have compared our approach with the state-of-the-art approaches. The computational results show the effectiveness of our approach.