A Cross Entropy-Genetic Algorithm for m-Machines No-Wait Job-Shop Scheduling Problem

No-wait job-shop scheduling (NWJSS) problem is one of the classical scheduling problems that exist on many kinds of industry with no-wait constraint, such as metal working, plastic, chemical, and food industries. Several methods have been proposed to solve this problem, both exact (i.e. integer programming) and metaheuristic methods. Cross entropy (CE), as a new metaheuristic, can be an alternative method to solve NWJSS problem. This method has been used in combinatorial optimization, as well as multi-external optimization and rare-event simulation. On these problems, CE implementation results an optimal value with less computational time in average. However, using original CE to solve large scale NWJSS requires high computational time. Considering this shortcoming, this paper proposed a hybrid of cross entropy with genetic algorithm (GA), called CEGA, on m-machines NWJSS. The results are compared with other metaheuritics: Genetic Algorithm-Simulated Annealing (GASA) and hybrid tabu search. The results showed that CEGA providing better or at least equal makespans in comparison with the other two methods.