A comparative study of annealing methods for batch scheduling problems

Abstract

Batch Scheduling is an important problem, relevant to a large sector of the processing industries. Methods like Simulated Annealing have been traditionally used in dealing with scheduling problems that are combinatorially complex. In this paper the performance of four different annealing strategies, Simulated Annealing (SA), Threshold Acceptance (TA) and Multicanonical Jump Walk Annealing (MJWA) with and without window factor scheduling have been compared for small and large size problems. Criteria such as robustness of the method and mean deviation from the optimal solution reveal that the MJWA with window factor scheduling is far superior to SA, TA or MJWA without window factor scheduling.