Scalability of exact SAT and CP approaches on larger JSPPR instances

Determine whether exact SAT and constraint programming approaches for the Job Shop Scheduling Problem with Power Requirements can remain competitive with metaheuristic methods on larger problems.

Background

The paper evaluates the proposed exact SAT and constraint programming formulations on 35 relatively small JSPPR benchmark instances, each involving between four and ten jobs and four machines. Both approaches prove optimality for every benchmark instance, with CP substantially faster than SAT. However, these results do not establish how the methods will perform as the number of jobs, operations, or other problem dimensions increases.

The authors explicitly identify the unresolved issue of whether the observed effectiveness of exact SAT and CP methods will persist relative to metaheuristic methods on larger JSPPR instances. This problem is motivated by the need to assess scalability and to determine whether the certified exact approaches can serve as competitive solution methods beyond the currently available small benchmark set.