Abstract In the work a single-machine scheduling problem is being considered, in which all tasks have a fixed availability (release) and delivery time. In the analyzed variant no-idle time is allowed on a machine. The purpose of optimization is to determine such order of tasks that minimizes the makespan, i.e. the time of execution of all the tasks. There is also a number of properties of the problem presented, in particular there are formulated block eliminating properties for no-idle constraint. There was an exact B&B algorithm based on the block properties proposed.

In this paper, a parallel multi-path variant of the well-known TSAB algorithm for the job shop scheduling problem is proposed. Coarse-grained parallelization method is employed, which allows for great scalability of the algorithm with accordance to Gustafon’s law. The resulting P-TSAB algorithm is tested using 162 well-known literature benchmarks. Results indicate that P-TSAB algorithm with a running time of one minute on a modern PC provides solutions comparable to the ones provided by the newest literature approaches to the job shop scheduling problem. Moreover, on average P-TSAB achieves two times smaller percentage relative deviation from the best known solutions than the standard variant of TSAB. The use of parallelization also relieves the user from having to fine-tune the algorithm. The P-TSAB algorithm can thus be used as module in real-life production planning systems or as a local search procedure in other algorithms. It can also provide the upper bound of minimal cycle time for certain problems of cyclic scheduling.

Abstract In this paper there is considered a flexible job shop problem of operations scheduling. The new, very fast method of determination of cycle time is presented. In the design of heuristic algorithm there was the neighborhood inspired by the game of golf applied. Lower bound of the criterion function was used in the search of the neighborhood.

The article introduces an innovative approch for the inspection challenge that represents a generalization of the classical Traveling Salesman Problem. Its priciple idea is to visit continuous areas (circles) in a way, that minimizes travelled distance. In practice, the problem can be defined as an issue of scheduling unmanned aerial vehicle which has discrete-continuous nature. In order to solve this problem the use of local search algorithms is proposed.