Job Shop Scheduling

Job shop scheduling is the problem of assigning a set of jobs (tasks) to a set of machines (resources) over time, subject to precedence and capacity constraints, with the goal of optimizing performance metrics such as makespan (total completion time), lateness, or cost. The job shop problem is a classic combinatorial optimization problem in operations research, addressed through heuristics (greedy dispatching rules, simulated annealing, genetic algorithms) and exact algorithms (branch-and-bound, constraint programming). It is fundamental to manufacturing, project management, and computational scheduling.