A MODULAR SIMULATED ANNEALING ALGORITHM FOR MULTI- AGENT SYSTEMS: A JOB-SHOP SCHEDULING APPLIACTION

In this paper, a parallel implementation of a modular simulated annealing (MSA) algorithm, a shortened simulated annealing (SA) algorithm, applied to classical job-shop scheduling (JSS) problems is presented. The implementation has been done as a multiple island system suitable to run on the Distributed Resource Machine (DRM) environment, which is a novel scalable, distributed virtual machine developed based on Java technology. The JSS problems tackled are very well known difficult benchmarks, which are considered to measure the quality of such systems. The support of the DRM environment was very effective with respect to message passing, having collaboration with a remote machine. The empirical results show that the method proposed is quite successful compared to the ordinary MSA and other systems described in literature