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arXiv · 2608.19711

High-Multiplicity Flexible Job Shops: From Exact Recurrent Fluid Attainment to Structure-Guided Finite-Horizon Scheduling

Wenjun Zheng·Wei Qu·Weilin Cai·Jianfeng Mao
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Abstract

High-multiplicity flexible job shops involve many copies of a small set of job types that must be scheduled on alternative machines. Fluid relaxations provide scalable workload lower bounds, but their fractional machine allocations do not define feasible schedules for individual jobs. We show that, after a suitable finite scaling, an optimal fluid allocation can be realized exactly by a feasible repeating discrete schedule. The construction scales the fluid allocation to integer operation counts, places the resulting operations in nonoverlapping machine intervals, repeats this arrangement, and links operations across repetitions into individual jobs without moving any interval, thereby enforcing job precedence while preserving machine feasibility. For growing finite instances with the same job-type composition, even with a fixed number of extra jobs, the gap between the optimal makespan and the fluid lower bound remains bounded by a constant; hence the relative gap vanishes as the instance grows. Guided by this repeated structure, we develop type-based cyclic template replay (TCTR), which searches job-type templates using an optimization model whose size does not grow with the number of job copies and replays the selected template on the full instance. On 676 multiplicity-expanded public flexible-job-shop instances, TCTR is feasible in every case and achieves a 1.54% mean gap to the fluid lower bound, compared with 5.32% for a job-indexed adaptive large-neighborhood search and 6.18% for a hybrid genetic algorithm.

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Wenjun Zheng, Wei Qu, Weilin Cai, Jianfeng Mao. 2026-08-20. High-Multiplicity Flexible Job Shops: From Exact Recurrent Fluid Attainment to Structure-Guided Finite-Horizon Scheduling. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19711

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