A survey of genetic algorithms for shop scheduling problems

Genetic algorithms are a very popular heuristic which have been suc-cessfully applied to many optimization problems within the last 30 years. In this chapter, we give a survey on some genetic algorithms for shop scheduling problems. In a shop scheduling problem, a set of jobs has to be processed on a set of machines such that a specific optimization crite-rion is satisfied. According to the restrictions on the technological routes of the jobs, we distinguish a flow shop (each job is characterized by the same technological route), a job shop (each job has a specific route) and an open shop (no technological route is imposed on the jobs). We also consider some extensions of shop scheduling problems such as hybrid or flexible shops (at each processing stage, we may have a set of parallel machines) or the inclusion of additional processing constraints such as controllable processing times, release times, setup times or the no-wait condition. After giving an introduction into basic genetic algorithms dis