Solving the no-wait job shop scheduling problem with due date constraints: A problem transformation approach

This paper addresses the job shop scheduling problem with the additional condition that no waiting time is allowed between the operations of the jobs. Moreover, jobs must be fully processed by their respective due dates. The goal is to minimize the makespan. The problem is strongly NP-Hard. This paper transforms the mentioned problem to another scheduling problem and proposes mathematical models for both. The mathematical models proposed for the transformed problem demonstrate a better performance compared to the models developed for the original problem. A genetic algorithm is developed to deal with larger instances of both the original and the transformed problems. The evidence gathered from the computational results confirm that the proposed GA has better performance when applied to the transformed problem.