History
The modelling of shop problems by means of latin rectangles applied in LiSA was developed by
Heidemarie Bräsel (Lateinische Rechtecke in der Schedulingtheorie, Habilitationsschrift, TU
Magdeburg, 1990).
The development of LiSA started as part of two projects sponsored by the Land Sachsen/Anhalt:
Part 1: Latin Rectangles in Scheduling Theory (1997-1999)
Part 2: LiSA – A Library of Scheduling Algorithms (1999-2001)
The LiSA – Team
Research groups at universities are usually not homogeneously formed over a long period. The following overview contains the names of most scientists and students who were involved in the development of LiSA as well as their major working areas:
Heidemarie Bräsel: Initiator of the project, leader of the LiSA team and supervisor of diploma and Ph.D. sudents (1997-2009)
Thomas Tautenhahn: Responsible for the efficiency of the data structures and algorithms, supervisor of students in the area of programming (1997-2000), habilitation thesis 2002
Per Willenius: Responsible for the user interface of LiSA, the corresponding algorithms and for the coordination of all program modules, supervisor of students in the area of programming (1997-2001), Ph.D. thesis 2000
Martin Harborth: Responsible for the complexity module in the main program of LiSA, supervisor of students in the area of programming (1997-1999), Ph.d. thesis 1999
Lars Dornheim: Responsible for the compatibility of LiSA under various computer configurations and operating systems (1998-1999) In the first time period, the following students were involved:
Ines Wasmund: Visualization of schedules by Gantt charts
Andreas Winkler: Several neighborhood search procedures
Marc Mörig: Matching algorithms for open shop problems, reducibility algorithms
Christian Schulz: Shifting bottleneck heuristic for the job shop problem
Manuela Vogel: A heuristic for the flow shop problem.
The version 2.0 of LiSA was represented at the CEBIT 2000.
For a short period, the following students were also involved in the project:
Holger Hennes, Birgit Grohe, Christian Tietjen, Carsten Malchau und Tanka Nath Dhamala (Sandwich fellow, Ph.D. thesis 2002). In a practical computer course 2001, Thomas Klemm, Andre Herms, Jan Tusch, Ivo Rössling, Marco Kleber and Claudia Isensee incorporated new algorithms into LiSA.
In 2002, Lars Dornheim, Sandra Kutz, Marc Mörig and Ivo Rössling prepared LiSA for a cooperative development. The modularity of the software has been substantially improved. Several errors have been removed so that the software is now more stable. A specific LiSA server has been installed for the communication between the developers and the users of LiSA, and a version management system as well as a bug tracking system have been incorporated. The concept of incorporating own algorithms has been improved and simplified. A new homepage has been created. LiSA Version 2.3 was ready. For the work on LiSA, the students received the special award of the jury at the student conference of the DMV meeting in Halle/S. (2002).
The major work on LiSA Version 3 was done by Marc Mörig, Jan Tusch, Mathias Plauschin and Frank Engelhardt. The main progress in LiSA Version 3 can be described as follows:
- The file format has been changed by Jan Tusch to .xml, he also implemented the genetic algorithms;
- The call of algorithms has been automated by Marc Mörig, later also by Mathias Plauschin and by Frank Engelhardt. They also developed further the filtering of the results into a file compatible with Excel, implemented for the first time by Andre Herms in Perl;
- For the Windows versions, there is an automatic installer created by Mathias Plauschin, improved by Frank Engelhardt. For the use of the installer, there is no further software required.
For the last four years, Frank Werner also collaborated with the LiSA team, mainly for publications based on the use of algorithms in LiSA. He was responsible for the English version of this handbook.