Download Visualising the `Shifting Bottleneck` Scheduling Algorithm

6.1.3
Effectiveness vs. Existing Solutions
This section will attempt to evaluate how effective the software is compared to similar visualisation
tools and other methods of learning about the Job Shop problem and the Shifting Bottleneck algorithm.
RIOT/GRAAL - The Remote Interactive Optimization Testbed is “a new offering for the WWW audience providing interactive educational and research tools for optimization problems.” (Adler et al.,
2007). Of particular interest is the GRaph Applications AppLet (Goldschmidt and Hochbaum,
1998), a Java-written applet which contains visualisations for the Minimum Spanning Tree (MST)
and Travelling Sales Person (TSP) graph problems. It allows the user to draw their own graph
by placing nodes and arcs or can generate random instances of large sizes (upto 300 nodes) and
different arc densities. Several algorithms are implemented for solving the TSP problem, each visualisation moves step by step through the algorithm updating the graph and the speed of progress
is set by the user via a slider.
Figure 6.1: GRAAL visualisation of TSP
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