Energy-Saving Distributed Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Optimization with Dual Resource Constraints Based on Integrated Q-Learning Multi-Objective Grey Wolf Optimizer

The distributed flexible job shop scheduling problem(DFJSP)has attracted great attention with the growth of the global manufacturing industry.General DFJSP research only considers machine constraints and ignores worker constraints.As one critical factor of production,effective utilization of worker resources can increase productivity.Meanwhile,energy consumption is a growing concern due to the increasingly serious environmental issues.Therefore,the distributed flexible job shop scheduling problem with dual resource constraints(DFJSP-DRC)for minimizing makespan and total energy consumption is studied in this paper.To solve the problem,we present a multi-objective mathematical model for DFJSP-DRC and propose a Q-learning-based multi-objective grey wolf optimizer(Q-MOGWO).In Q-MOGWO,high-quality initial solutions are generated by a hybrid initialization strategy,and an improved active decoding strategy is designed to obtain the scheduling schemes.To further enhance the local search capability and expand the solution space,two wolf predation strategies and three critical factory neighborhood structures based on Q-learning are proposed.These strategies and structures enable Q-MOGWO to explore the solution space more efficiently and thus find better Pareto solutions.The effectiveness of Q-MOGWO in addressing DFJSP-DRC is verified through comparison with four algorithms using 45 instances.The results reveal that Q-MOGWO outperforms comparison algorithms in terms of solution quality.

An Improved Harris Hawk Optimization Algorithm for Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem

Flexible job shop scheduling problem(FJSP)is the core decision-making problem of intelligent manufacturing production management.The Harris hawk optimization(HHO)algorithm,as a typical metaheuristic algorithm,has been widely employed to solve scheduling problems.However,HHO suffers from premature convergence when solving NP-hard problems.Therefore,this paper proposes an improved HHO algorithm(GNHHO)to solve the FJSP.GNHHO introduces an elitism strategy,a chaotic mechanism,a nonlinear escaping energy update strategy,and a Gaussian random walk strategy to prevent premature convergence.A flexible job shop scheduling model is constructed,and the static and dynamic FJSP is investigated to minimize the makespan.This paper chooses a two-segment encoding mode based on the job and the machine of the FJSP.To verify the effectiveness of GNHHO,this study tests it in 23 benchmark functions,10 standard job shop scheduling problems(JSPs),and 5 standard FJSPs.Besides,this study collects data from an agricultural company and uses the GNHHO algorithm to optimize the company’s FJSP.The optimized scheduling scheme demonstrates significant improvements in makespan,with an advancement of 28.16%for static scheduling and 35.63%for dynamic scheduling.Moreover,it achieves an average increase of 21.50%in the on-time order delivery rate.The results demonstrate that the performance of the GNHHO algorithm in solving FJSP is superior to some existing algorithms.

A Novel Collaborative Evolutionary Algorithm with Two-Population for Multi-Objective Flexible Job Shop Scheduling

Job shop scheduling(JS)is an important technology for modern manufacturing.Flexible job shop scheduling(FJS)is critical in JS,and it has been widely employed in many industries,including aerospace and energy.FJS enables any machine from a certain set to handle an operation,and this is an NP-hard problem.Furthermore,due to the requirements in real-world cases,multi-objective FJS is increasingly widespread,thus increasing the challenge of solving the FJS problems.As a result,it is necessary to develop a novel method to address this challenge.To achieve this goal,a novel collaborative evolutionary algorithmwith two-population based on Pareto optimality is proposed for FJS,which improves the solutions of FJS by interacting in each generation.In addition,several experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed method is promising and effective for multi-objective FJS,which has discovered some new Pareto solutions in the well-known benchmark problems,and some solutions can dominate the solutions of some other methods.

Solving flexible job shop scheduling problem by a multi-swarm collaborative genetic algorithm

The flexible job shop scheduling problem(FJSP),which is NP-hard,widely exists in many manufacturing industries.It is very hard to be solved.A multi-swarm collaborative genetic algorithm(MSCGA)based on the collaborative optimization algorithm is proposed for the FJSP.Multi-population structure is used to independently evolve two sub-problems of the FJSP in the MSCGA.Good operators are adopted and designed to ensure this algorithm to achieve a good performance.Some famous FJSP benchmarks are chosen to evaluate the effectiveness of the MSCGA.The adaptability and superiority of the proposed method are demonstrated by comparing with other reported algorithms.

Biased Bi-Population Evolutionary Algorithm for Energy-Efficient Fuzzy Flexible Job Shop Scheduling with Deteriorating Jobs

There are many studies about flexible job shop scheduling problem with fuzzy processing time and deteriorating scheduling,but most scholars neglect the connection between them,which means the purpose of both models is to simulate a more realistic factory environment.From this perspective,the solutions can be more precise and practical if both issues are considered simultaneously.Therefore,the deterioration effect is treated as a part of the fuzzy job shop scheduling problem in this paper,which means the linear increase of a certain processing time is transformed into an internal linear shift of a triangle fuzzy processing time.Apart from that,many other contributions can be stated as follows.A new algorithm called reinforcement learning based biased bi-population evolutionary algorithm(RB2EA)is proposed,which utilizes Q-learning algorithm to adjust the size of the two populations and the interaction frequency according to the quality of population.A local enhancement method which combimes multiple local search stratgies is presented.An interaction mechanism is designed to promote the convergence of the bi-population.Extensive experiments are designed to evaluate the efficacy of RB2EA,and the conclusion can be drew that RB2EA is able to solve energy-efficient fuzzy flexible job shop scheduling problem with deteriorating jobs(EFFJSPD)efficiently.

Improved gray wolf optimizer for distributed flexible job shop scheduling problem

The distributed flexible job shop scheduling problem(DFJSP),which is an extension of the flexible job shop scheduling problem,is a famous NP-complete combinatorial optimization problem.This problem is widespread in the manufacturing industries and comprises the following three subproblems:the assignment of jobs to factories,the scheduling of operations to machines,and the sequence of operations on machines.However,studies on DFJSP are seldom because of its difficulty.This paper proposes an effective improved gray wolf optimizer(IGWO)to solve the aforementioned problem.In this algorithm,new encoding and decoding schemes are designed to represent the three subproblems and transform the encoding into a feasible schedule,respectively.Four crossover operators are developed to expand the search space.A local search strategy with the concept of a critical factory is also proposed to improve the exploitability of IGWO.Effective schedules can be obtained by changing factory assignments and operation sequences in the critical factory.The proposed IGWO algorithm is evaluated on 69 famous benchmark instances and compared with six state-of-the-art algorithms to demonstrate its efficacy considering solution quality and computational efficiency.Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has achieved good improvement.Particularly,the proposed IGWO updates the new upper bounds of 13 difficult benchmark instances.

Particle swarm optimization with variable neighborhood search for multiobjective flexible job shop scheduling problem

The simulation on benchmarks is a very simple and efficient method to evaluate the performance of the algorithm for solving flexible job shop scheduling model.Due to the assignment and scheduling decisions,flexible job shop scheduling problem(FJSP)becomes extremely hard to solve for production management.A discrete multi-objective particle swarm optimization(PSO)and simulated annealing(SA)algorithm with variable neighborhood search is developed for FJSP with three criteria:the makespan,the total workload and the critical machine workload.Firstly,a discrete PSO is designed and then SA algorithm performs variable neighborhood search integrating two neighborhoods on public critical block to enhance the search ability.Finally,the selection strategy of the personal-best individual and global-best individual from the external archive is developed in multi-objective optimization.Through the experimental simulation on matlab,the tests on Kacem instances,Brdata instances and BCdata instances show that the modified discrete multi-objective PSO algorithm is a promising and valid method for optimizing FJSP with three criteria.

Optimal Design of Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Under Resource Preemption Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning

With the popularization of multi-variety and small-batch production patterns,the flexible job shop scheduling problem(FJSSP)has been widely studied.The sharing of processing resources by multiple machines frequently occurs due to space constraints in a flexible shop,which results in resource preemption for processing workpieces.Resource preemption complicates the constraints of scheduling problems that are otherwise difficult to solve.In this paper,the flexible job shop scheduling problem under the process resource preemption scenario is modeled,and a two-layer rule scheduling algorithm based on deep reinforcement learning is proposed to achieve the goal of minimum scheduling time.The simulation experiments compare our scheduling algorithm with two traditional metaheuristic optimization algorithms among different processing resource distribution scenarios in static scheduling environment.The results suggest that the two-layer rule scheduling algorithm based on deep reinforcement learning is more effective than the meta-heuristic algorithm in the application of processing resource preemption scenarios.Ablation experiments,generalization,and dynamic experiments are performed to demonstrate the excellent performance of our method for FJSSP under resource preemption.

Flexible Job Shop Composite Dispatching Rule Mining Approach Based on an Improved Genetic Programming Algorithm

To obtain a suitable scheduling scheme in an effective time range,the minimum completion time is taken as the objective of Flexible Job Shop scheduling Problems(FJSP)with different scales,and Composite Dispatching Rules(CDRs)are applied to generate feasible solutions.Firstly,the binary tree coding method is adopted,and the constructed function set is normalized.Secondly,a CDR mining approach based on an Improved Genetic Programming Algorithm(IGPA)is designed.Two population initialization methods are introduced to enrich the initial population,and a superior and inferior population separation strategy is designed to improve the global search ability of the algorithm.At the same time,two individual mutation methods are introduced to improve the algorithm’s local search ability,to achieve the balance between global search and local search.In addition,the effectiveness of the IGPA and the superiority of CDRs are verified through comparative analysis.Finally,Deep Reinforcement Learning(DRL)is employed to solve the FJSP by incorporating the CDRs as the action set,the selection times are counted to further verify the superiority of CDRs.

Scheduling Optimization Modelling:A Case Study of a Woven Label Manufacturing Company

Production scheduling involves all activities of building production schedules,including coordinating and assigning activities to each person,group of people,or machine and arranging work orders in each workplace.Production scheduling must solve all problems such as minimizing customer wait time,storage costs,and production time;and effectively using the enterprise’s human resources.This paper studies the application of flexible job shop modelling on scheduling a woven labelling process.The labelling process includes several steps which are handled in different work-stations.Each workstation is also comprised of several identical parallel machines.In this study,job splitting is allowed so that the power of work stations can be utilized better.The final objective is to minimize the total completion time of all jobs.The results show a significant improvement since the new planning may save more than 60%of lead time compared to the current schedule.The contribution of this research is to propose a flexible job shop model for scheduling a woven labelling process.The proposed approach can also be applied to support complex production scheduling processes under fuzzy environments in different industries.A practical case study demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Modeling and Solving Lot-Splitting Scheduling Problem Based on Process

In flexible job-shop batch scheduling problem, the optimal lot-size of different process is not always the same because of different processing time and set-up time. Even for the same process of the same workpiece, the choice of machine also affects the optimal lot-size. In addition, different choices of lot-size between the constrained processes will impact the manufacture efficiency. Considering that each process has its own appropriate lot-size, we put forward the concept of scheduling with lot-splitting based on process and set up the scheduling model of lot-splitting to critical path process as the core. The model could update the set of batch process and machine selection strategy dynamically to determine processing route and arrange proper lot-size for different processes, to achieve the purpose of optimizing the makespan and reducing the processing batches effectively. The experiment results show that, comparing with lot-splitting scheduling scheme based on workpiece, this model optimizes the makespan and improves the utilization efficiency of the machine. It also greatly decreases the machined batches （42%） and reduces the complexity of shop scheduling production management.