¹Athens University of Economics and Business, Athens, Greece

Correspondence: GI Zobolas, Department of Management Science & Technology, Management Science Laboratory, Athens University of Economics and Business, Evelpidon 47A & Leukados 33, Office 913, Athens, 11369, Greece. E-mail: gzobolas@aueb.gr

Received October 2006; Accepted September 2007; Published online 12 December 2007.

Abstract

In this paper, a hybrid metaheuristic method for the job shop scheduling problem is proposed. The optimization criterion is the minimization of makespan and the solution method consists of three components: a Differential Evolution-based algorithm to generate a population of initial solutions, a Variable Neighbourhood Search method and a Genetic Algorithm to improve the population; the latter two are interconnected. Computational experiments on benchmark data sets demonstrate that the proposed hybrid metaheuristic reaches high quality solutions in short computational times using fixed parameter settings.