abstract = "This paper presents an efficient method of enhancing
genetic algorithms (GAs) for solving the Job-Shop
Scheduling Problem (JSSP), by generating near optimal
initial populations. Since the choice of the initial
population has a high impact on the speed of the
evolution and the quality of the final results, we
focused on generating its individuals using genetically
evolved priority dispatching rules. Our experiments
show a significant increase in quality and speed of
scheduling with GAs, and in some cases the evolved
priority rules alone determined better solutions then
the GA itself. The analysed reference GA uses Giffler
and Thompson (GT) heuristic and priority lists. To
speed up the generation of priority rules, we have used
a weighted sum of priority rules formula that revealed
significantly better performances than Genetic
Programming (GP). For evaluation of the proposed
algorithm, the well known benchmark data sets from
Fisher and Thompson (F&T) and Laurence Kramer (LA) have
been used.",