Complex random sample scheduling and its application to an N/M/F/Fmax problem

“Complex Random Sample Scheduling(CRSS)” was proposed in this paper as an efficient heuristic method for solving any permutation scheduling problems. To show the effectiveness of the proposed CRSS, it was applied to an N-job, M-machine, permutation flowshop scheduling problem to minimize makespan, N/M/F/F_max. Numerical experiments made it clear that the proposed CRSS provides a schedule very close to the near-optimal schedule obtained by the existing promising heuristic methods such as taboo search and simulated annealing, within less computation time than these heuristic methods.