Tail Lard 1993
Tail Lard 1993
Tail Lard 1993
North-Holland
Abstract: In this paper, we propose 260 randomly generated scheduling problems whose size is greater
than that of the rare examples published. Such sizes correspond to real dimensions of industrial
problems. The types of problems that we propose are: the permutation flow shop, the job shop and the
open shop scheduling problems. We restrict ourselves to basic problems: the processing times are fixed,
there are neither set-up times nor due dates nor release dates, etc. Then, the objective is the
minimization of the makespan.
Taboo search is very easy to implement and can The random number generator
provides results that are better than those ob-
tained by any other heuristic method described in Let us recall the implementation of the linear
[9] or in Applegate and Cook [1] if its parameters congruential generator we have used which is
are well tuned. based on the recursive formula
In order to propose problems that are as diffi-
cult as possible (the most interesting ones) we Xi+ 1 = (16807Xi) m o d ( 2 3 1 - 1).
have generated many instances of problems that This implementation uses only 32-bit integers and
we have 'solved' in a summary way with taboo provides a uniformly distribution sequence of
search. Then, we have chosen the 10 problems numbers between 0 and 1 (not contained):
that seemed to be the hardest ones and we have Step O. Initial seed and constants:
solved them once more, allowing our heuristic X 0 ( O < X 0 < 2 31-1);
method to perform a higher number of iteration. a = 16807, b = 127773, c = 2836, m = 231 - 1.
Obviously, the choice of the hardest problems Step 1. Modification of the seed:
is very subjective. We decided that a problem was
interesting if the best makespan we found was far k := [ X J b I ,
from a lower bound of the makespans and if
Xi+ 1 : = a ( X i rood b) - k c ,
many attempts to solve the problem (starting
from various initial solutions) did not provide the If X i+1 < 0, then let
same solution. Such a method enabled us to
Xi+l:=Xi+l + m .
detect the simplest problems but we may not
propose problems that have a local optimum with Step 2. New value of the seed: Xi+ 1.
a large attraction basin. Current value of the generator: Xi+ l/m.
Below, we shall denote by U(0, 1) the pseudo-
random number that this generator provides. We
have 0 < U(0, 1) < 1 for every generated number.
The problems We shall denote by U[a, b] (with a < b, a and
b integers) the integer number
The flow shop problems are characterized by work up to the end of the operations, and let T~
the processing times dij. of job j on machine i be its total processing time. We have:
(1 <_ i < m , 1 < j < n). We have generated the val-
i-1 )
ues of dij by the following way:
For i = 1 to m
for j = 1 to n
dij := U[1, 99].
ai=min. ~ dk~ ,
We propose problems with 5, 10 and 20 ma- J k=i+l
chines and from 20 to 500 jobs. We compute the
lower bound of the makespan as presented be-
low. j=l
Let b i be the minimum amount of time before
machine i starts to work and a i be the minimum Clearly, the optimal makespan Cm~
* , is greater
amount of time that it remains inactive after its than or equal to the maximum between the mini-
Step 1.
For j = 1 to n
For i = 1 to m a i=min.
{m)
with k ' such that Mk, j = i;
~ dk~ ,
Swap Mij and Mv[i.ml j. J k=k'+l
Let us note the use of another initial seed for
the choice of the machines: machine seed. with k ' such that Mk, j = i;
An instance of a small open shop problem,
obtained with the same procedures, is given ex- T, = ~ dk,j,
tensively in Table 4. ]=1
The lower bound is computed as previously with k ' such that Mk, j = i.
but bi, a i and T/ are defined as follows: We conjecture again that this bound is tight if
k'-I / n / m ~ 0% because we have always found an opti-
bi=m) n k~_ldk]} , mal schedule if n / m > 6, considering more than
2000 problems whose size was varying from 20
jobs, 2 machines to 150 jobs, 15 machines, passing chine seed in Figure 2. Stars in Figure 2 indicate
by 500 jobs, 4 machines. optimum values.
The time needed to perform one iteration of
taboo search is about 20.10-6nm seconds on
Open shop problems
'Silicon Graphics' workstation. Table 2 and Fig-
ure 2 are analogous to Table 1 and Figure 1, but, We do not know instances of such problems in
for job shop problems, we give in addition m a - the literature. This is why we give problems of
Machine
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