A comparative study of annealing methods for batch scheduling problems

Batch Scheduling is an important problem, relevant to a large sector of the processing industries. Methods like Simulated Annealing have been traditio nally used in dealing with scheduling problems that are combinatorially com plex. In this paper the performance of four different annealing strategies, Simulated Annealing (SA), Threshold Acceptance (TA) and Multicanonical Jum p Walk Annealing (MJWA) with and without window factor scheduling have been compared for small and large size problems. Criteria such as robustness of the method and mean deviation from the optimal solution reveal that the MJ WA with window factor scheduling is far superior to SA, TA or MJWA without window factor scheduling.