Modified bottleneck-based heuristic for large-scale job-shop scheduling problems with a single bottleneck

A modified bottleneck-based (MB) heuristic for large-scale job-shop scheduling problems with a well- defined bottleneck is suggested,which is simpler but more tailored than the shifting bottleneck (SB) procedure. In this algorithm,the bottleneck is first scheduled optimally while the non-bottleneck machines are subordinated around the solutions of the bottleneck schedule by some effective dispatching rules.Computational results indicate that the MB heuristic can achieve a better tradeoff between solution quality and computational time compared to SB procedure for medium-size problems.Furthermore,it can obtain a good solution in a short time for large-scale job- shop scheduling problems.