LAUSR

Abstract In this paper, we propose an innovative hybrid integrated approach between simulated annealing (SA) and control theoretic based distributed arrival time control (DATC), named SA-DATC. The two approaches have been combined to achieve the objective of Justin-Time (JIT) scheduling in an open-shop system. This approach makes the two algorithms work together aimed with combining the main advantages of each of them, to obtain a reactive control strategy. The SA algorithm plays a role as the machine-route explorer, while the DATC algorithm is inserted into the SA loop, allowing searching for the best arrival times of jobs to satisfy the JIT objective wanted. The performance of this new hybrid SA-DATC approach is evaluated with quadratic linear program solutions to test its relative performance in a static environment. Computational results show that the algorithm performs well on the most of the test problems generated randomly in this paper with an interesting computational time, proving that our approach is favorable for an open-shop scheduling problem.