Later today Uday Chakraborty is giving a talk on flow-shop scheduling as part of the weekly colloquium series at our department. The talk will be given at 4:00pm in room 320 CCB at UMSL. The abstract follows:
The flow shop scheduling problem, or the problem of assignment of times to a set of jobs for processing through a series of machines, is NP-complete and has long received the attention of researchers in operations research, engineering, and computer science. Over the past several years, there has been a spurt of interest in “intelligent” heuristics and metaheuristics for solving this problem — ranging from genetic algorithms to tabu search to complex hybrid techniques. This talk discusses some of the newest approaches to this problem, their shortcomings, and directions for future research.