Job sequencing and tool switching problem metaheuristic

During the following pages it will be presented a metaheuristic towards the solution of the job Sequencing and tool Switching Problem(SSP), a NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem arising from computer and manufacturing systems. Putting interest in previous works, the precedents in the literature will be studied in order to understand the scope of the solution development. Focusing on the current state of the art, an alternative path will be presented with the aim to achieve good quality solutions in a feasible time or even settle a new basis for future works. The metaheuristic will be chosen between two developed candidates, which will be defined in a theoretical way and later will be executed to prove the results. Through computational experiments it will be shown how the designed metaheuristics can achieve the best results known in the literature and even improve them in some of the cases. Analysing the results of each proposed metaheuristic one of them will be selected as the proper one for the SSP. After analysing the computational results it will be presented an informatics tool able to calculate the sequence and the tool distribution for the datasets studied in Laporte et al. (2004)