Faster, competitive approach for the job sequencing and tool switching problem

We address the practical industrial problem known in the literature as job sequencing and tool switching problem, whose objective is to determine a job processing order that minimizes the total number of setup operations. To address this NP-hard problem, we present an implementation of the iterated local search meta-heuristic. Considering all instances available in the literature, the proposed method is compared to the current state-of-the-art method for the problem solution. The experiments carried out demonstrate that the quality of the reported solutions is equivalent to the best-known results. However, the proposed method substantially outperforms the current state of the art when considering the execution time required to obtain the solutions. Given the practical nature of the problem, faster methods are preferable for use in industries aiming at production planning. Additionally, new better results are presented for some instances widely used in the literature.