Cataloged from PDF version of article.Beam Search is a heuristic method for solving optimization problems. It is an adaptation of the branch and bound\ud method in which only some nodes are evaluated in the search tree. At any level, only the promising nodes are kept for\ud further branching and remaining nodes are pruned o permanently. In this paper, we develop a beam search based\ud scheduling algorithm for the job shop problem. Both the makespan and mean tardiness are used as the performance\ud measures. The proposed algorithm is also compared with other well known search methods and dispatching rules for a\ud wide variety of problems. The results indicate that the beam search technique is a very competitive and promising tool\ud which deserves further research in the scheduling literature. Ó 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved

In this paper, we study the reactive scheduling problems in a stochastic manufacturing environment. Specifically, we test the several scheduling policies under machine breakdowns in a classical job shop system. In addition, we measure the effect of system size and type of work allocation (uniform and bottleneck) on the system performance. The performance of the system is measured for the mean tardiness and makespan criteria. We also investigate a partial scheduling scheme under both deterministic and stochastic environments for several system configurations