A resource-constrained job shop scheduling problem with general precedence constraints

In this paper, a rule for dispatching operations, named the Most Dissimilar Resources (MDR) dispatching rule is presented. The MDR dispatching rule has been designed to maximize utilization of resources in a resource-constrained job shop with general precedence constraints. In shown that solving the above scheduling problem with the MDR dispatching rule is equivalent to multiple solving of the maximum clique problem. A graph theoretic approach is used to model the latter problem. The pairwise counting heuristic of computational time complexity O(n$^{2}$) is developed to solve the maximum clique problem. An attempt is made to combine the MDR dispatching rule with the existing look-ahead dispatching rules. Computational experience indicates that the combined MDR dispatching rules provide solutions of better quality and consistency than the dispatching rules tested in a resource-constrained job shop.