A Web-Lab Environment for the Study of the Job Shop Problem
This work proposes a Web-Based laboratory where researchers share the facilities of a simulation environment for parallel algorithms which solves scheduling problems known as Job Shop Problem (JSP). The environment supports multi-language platforms and uses a low cost, high performance Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) connected to a Java application server to help design more efficient solutions for JSP. Within a single web environment one can analyze and compare different methods and meta-heuristics. Each newly developed method is stored in an environment library and made available to all other users of the environment. This amassment of openly accessible solution methods will allow for the rapid convergence towards optimal solutions for JSP. The algorithm uses the parallel architecture of the system to handle threads. Each thread represents a job operation and the number of threads scales with the problem’s size. The threads exchange information in order to find the best solution. This cooperation decreases response times by one or two orders of magnitude.