Decomposition methods for the preemptive Flexible Job-Shop Scheduling Problem

Overview & Synopsis

In this paper, we focus on exact methods to solve the preemptive Flexible Job-Shop Scheduling Problem with makespan and total completion time minimisation objective functions. Mathematical and constraint programming models enable the resolution of this problem for small instances. However, as an NP-hard problem, the cost of solving grows rapidly when considering larger instances. In this regard, we propose a logic-based Benders decomposition that relies on an efficient branch-and-bound procedure to solve the subproblem representing a pure (non-flexible) preemptive job-shop scheduling problem. Computational experiments are carried out and show the very good performance of our proposals.