no / No / Scheduling systems based on traditional heuristic rules, which deal with the complexities of manufacturing systems, have been used by researchers for the past six decades. These heuristics rules prioritise all jobs that are waiting to be processed on a resource. In this paper, a novel Index Based Heuristic (IBH) solution for the Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP) is presented with the objective of minimising the overall Makespan (Cmax). The JSSP is still a challenge to researchers and is far from being completely solved due to its combinatorial nature. JSSP suits the challenges of current manufacturing environments. The proposed IBH calculates the indices of candidate jobs and assigns the job with the lower index value to the available machine. To minimise the gap between jobs, a swap technique is introduced. The swap technique takes candidate jobs for a machine and swaps them without violating the precedence constraint. Several benchmark problems are solved from the literature to test the validity and effectiveness of the proposed heuristic. The results show that the proposed IBH based algorithm outperforms the traditional heuristics and is a valid methodology for JSSP optimization.

Yes / Scheduling is an important element that has a major impact on the efficiency of all manufacturing processes. It plays an important role in optimising the manufacturing times and costs resulting in energy efficient processes. It has been estimated that more than 75% of manufacturing processes occur in small batches. In such environments, processes must be able to perform a variety of operations on a mix of different batches. Batch-job scheduling optimisation is the response to such low batch manufacturing problems. The optimisation of batch-job process scheduling problem is still a challenge to researchers and is far from being completely solved due to its combinatorial nature. In this paper, a novel hybrid heuristic (HybH) solution approach for batch-job scheduling problem is presented with the objective of optimising the overall Makespan (Cmax). The proposed HybH is the combination of Index Based Heuristic (IBH) and the Finished Batch-Job (FBJ) process schedule. The heuristic assigns the first operation to a batch-job using IBH and the remaining operations on the basis FBJ process schedule. The FBJ process schedule gives priority to the batch-job with early finished operations, without violating the constraints of process order. The proposed HybH is explained with the help of a detailed example. Several benchmark problems are solved from the literature to check the validity and effectiveness of the proposed heuristic. The presented HybH has achieved batch-job process schedules which have outperformed the traditional heuristics. The results are encouraging and show that the proposed heuristic is a valid methodology for batch process scheduling optimisation.