Variable Neighbourhood Search for Job Shop Scheduling Problems

Abstract

Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS) is one of the most recent metaheuristics used for problem solving in which a systematic change of neighbourhood within a local search is carried out. In this paper, an investigation on implementing VNS for job shop scheduling problems is carried out tackling benchmark suites collected from OR library. The idea is to build the best local search and shake operations based on neighbourhood structure available. The results are presented and compared with the recent approaches in the literature. It is concluded that the VNS algorithm can generally find better results.