Ibrahim Kebbe, Hiroshi Yokoi and Yukinori Kakazu

Abstract:
Many deterministic computational methods have addressed flow and job shop scheduling - both being highly representative, critical problems. Such methods become obsolete due to solution time and difficulty due to problem size. Evolutionary computation appears feasible for overcoming these problems because it can handle large problems, but at the expense of closeness to optimal solutions. This paper partially compares the two problems based on evolutionary computational method, the vibrational potential method (VPM). To compare this to the performance of older methods, genetic algorithms (GAs) are used in the shop flow domain. This paper outlines VPM features in scheduling showing new advantages in problem formulation and solution.

Keywords: Scheduling, Evolutionary Computation, Genetic Algorithms, Vibrational Potential Method