DID YOU KNOW? DTIC has over 3.5 million final reports on DoD funded research, development, test, and evaluation activities available to our registered users. Click
HERE to register or log in.
Accession Number:
ADA289435
Title:
Backtracking Techniques for the Job Shop Scheduling Constraint Satisfaction Problem
Descriptive Note:
Research rept
Corporate Author:
CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIV PITTSBURGH PA ROBOTICS INST
Report Date:
1994-01-01
Pagination or Media Count:
34.0
Abstract:
This paper studies a version of the job shop scheduling problem in which some operations have to be scheduled within non-relaxable time windows i.e. earliestlatest possible start time windows. This problem is a well-known Np-complete Constraint Satisfaction Problem CSP. A popular method for solving this type of problems involves using depth-first backtrack search. In our earlier work, we focused on the development of consistency enforcing techniques and variablevalue ordering heuristics that improve the efficiency of this search procedure. In this paper, we combine these techniques with new look-back schemes that help the search procedure recover from so-called deadend search states i.e. partial solutions that cannot be completed without violating some constraints. More specifically, we successively describe three intelligent backtracking schemes 1 Dynamic Consistency Enforcement dynamically identifies critical subproblems and determines how far to backtrack by selectively enforcing higher levels of consistency among variables participating in these critical subproblems, 2 Learning Ordering From Failure dynamically modifies the order in which variables are instantiated based on earlier conflicts, and 3 Incomplete Backjumping Heuristic abandons areas of the search space that appear to require excessive computational efforts. These schemes are shown to 1 further reduce the average complexity of the backtrack search procedure, 2 enable our system to efficiently solve problems that could not be solved otherwise due to excessive computation cost, and 3 be more effective at solving job shop scheduling problems than other look-back schemes advocated in the literature.
Distribution Statement:
APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE
