A Benchmarking Suite for Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problems with Worker Flexibility under Uncertainty

Abstract

This paper addresses the Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem and its extension with Worker Flexibility, which integrates workforce assignment into machine-operation scheduling. Diverse solvers have been proposed across multiple optimization domains including Mathematical Programming, Constraint Programming, and Simulation-Based Optimization, or Simulation-based Optimization. These are often tailored to narrow use cases and validated on limited test problem sets, hindering cross-domain comparison. To overcome this, a comprehensive benchmarking environment built on 402 standardized Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem instances is introduced and systematically extended to include worker flexibility. This creates a hitherto unique collection of ready-to-use worker flexibility instances. The benchmark suite features several metrics for algorithm performance assessment, the visualization of algorithmic results, as well as state-of-the-art baseline results. This enables rigorous, reproducible, and comparable performance analysis between solvers and scheduling problem subdomains. Through the simulation-based integration of uncertainties in processing times as well as resource availabilities, the environment supports the development and evaluation of robust optimization strategies. The present work lays a foundation for targeted algorithm development and consistent performance evaluation in production scheduling research.