Constructive heuristics for shop scheduling problems are often based on
priority (or dispatching) rules. However, recent work has demonstrated
that insertion algorithms that step by step insert operations or
jobs into partial schedules usually clearly outperform priority rules.
In this paper, we consider various job shop scheduling problems with
setup times. For each job a specific technological route and a release
date are given. Moreover, the jobs are partitioned into groups. A
sequence independent setup time Srj is required on machine j when a
job of the r-th group is processed after a job of another group. We
consider different types of job availability, namely item and batch
availability. As objective function we use both regular and
nonregular criteria. For such problems we apply insertion techniques
combined with beam search. Especially we consider different insertion orders
of the operations or jobs. A refined variant of the insertion algorithm
is presented, where several operations are inserted in parallel. The
proposed variants have been tested on a large collection of test
problems and compared with other constructive algorithms based on
priority rules.