The cyclic job-shop scheduling problem: The new subclass of the job-shop problem and applying the simulated annealing to solve it

A new approach to the scheduling problem is described in the paper. The approach deals with the problem of planning the cyclic production and proposes to consider such scheduling problem as a cyclic job-shop problem of the order k, where k is the number of reiterations. It was found that planning only one iteration of the loop is less effective than planning the entire cycle. A number of test instances of the job-shop scheduling problem supplied by the Operation Research Library were used at experiments. The Simulated Annealing was applied to solve the instances. The experiments proved that the approach proposed allows increasing efficiency of cyclic scheduling significantly.