An enhanced exchange heuristic for resource constrained scheduling

In a paper published in 1987, an exchange heuristic for developing efficient makespans for resource constrained scheduling problems was presented. It has since been successfully applied to other types of scheduling problems including generalized job shop scheduling and project scheduling with limited resources. The increased flexibility of the heuristic is becoming realized. As such, several modifications of the exchange heuristic to increase the performance of developing efficient makespans are now presented. Empirical results of implementing these extended heuristics to problems in general job shop scheduling and their comparison to the original heuristic are also presented. Results show that the extended heuristics produce better makespan schedules on average than the original heuristic though there is a price of increased computational time.