Strengthened Dominance Relation NSGA-Ⅲ Algorithm Based on Differential Evolution to Solve Job Shop Scheduling Problem

The job shop scheduling problem is a classical combinatorial optimization challenge frequently encountered in manufacturing systems.It involves determining the optimal execution sequences for a set of jobs on various machines to maximize production efficiency and meet multiple objectives.The Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm Ⅲ(NSGA-Ⅲ)is an effective approach for solving the multi-objective job shop scheduling problem.Nevertheless,it has some limitations in solving scheduling problems,including inadequate global search capability,susceptibility to premature convergence,and challenges in balancing convergence and diversity.To enhance its performance,this paper introduces a strengthened dominance relation NSGA-Ⅲ algorithm based on differential evolution(NSGA-Ⅲ-SD).By incorporating constrained differential evolution and simulated binary crossover genetic operators,this algorithm effectively improves NSGA-Ⅲ’s global search capability while mitigating pre-mature convergence issues.Furthermore,it introduces a reinforced dominance relation to address the trade-off between convergence and diversity in NSGA-Ⅲ.Additionally,effective encoding and decoding methods for discrete job shop scheduling are proposed,which can improve the overall performance of the algorithm without complex computation.To validate the algorithm’s effectiveness,NSGA-Ⅲ-SD is extensively compared with other advanced multi-objective optimization algorithms using 20 job shop scheduling test instances.The experimental results demonstrate that NSGA-Ⅲ-SD achieves better solution quality and diversity,proving its effectiveness in solving the multi-objective job shop scheduling problem.

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.

Optimizing Big Data Retrieval and Job Scheduling Using Deep Learning Approaches

Big data analytics in business intelligence do not provide effective data retrieval methods and job scheduling that will cause execution inefficiency and low system throughput.This paper aims to enhance the capability of data retrieval and job scheduling to speed up the operation of big data analytics to overcome inefficiency and low throughput problems.First,integrating stacked sparse autoencoder and Elasticsearch indexing explored fast data searching and distributed indexing,which reduces the search scope of the database and dramatically speeds up data searching.Next,exploiting a deep neural network to predict the approximate execution time of a job gives prioritized job scheduling based on the shortest job first,which reduces the average waiting time of job execution.As a result,the proposed data retrieval approach outperforms the previous method using a deep autoencoder and Solr indexing,significantly improving the speed of data retrieval up to 53%and increasing system throughput by 53%.On the other hand,the proposed job scheduling algorithmdefeats both first-in-first-out andmemory-sensitive heterogeneous early finish time scheduling algorithms,effectively shortening the average waiting time up to 5%and average weighted turnaround time by 19%,respectively.

An Effective Neighborhood Solution Clipping Method for Large-Scale Job Shop Scheduling Problem

The job shop scheduling problem(JSSP)is a classical combinatorial optimization problem that exists widely in diverse scenarios of manufacturing systems.It is a well-known NP-hard problem,when the number of jobs increases,the difficulty of solving the problem exponentially increases.Therefore,a major challenge is to increase the solving efficiency of current algorithms.Modifying the neighborhood structure of the solutions can effectively improve the local search ability and efficiency.In this paper,a genetic Tabu search algorithm with neighborhood clipping(GTS_NC)is proposed for solving JSSP.A neighborhood solution clipping method is developed and embedded into Tabu search to improve the efficiency of the local search by clipping the search actions of unimproved neighborhood solutions.Moreover,a feasible neighborhood solution determination method is put forward,which can accurately distinguish feasible neighborhood solutions from infeasible ones.Both of the methods are based on the domain knowledge of JSSP.The proposed algorithmis compared with several competitive algorithms on benchmark instances.The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve superior results compared to other competitive algorithms.According to the numerical results of the experiments,it is verified that the neighborhood solution clippingmethod can accurately identify the unimproved solutions and reduces the computational time by at least 28%.

Applying Job Shop Scheduling to SMEs Manufacturing Platform to Revitalize B2B Relationship

A small and medium enterprises(SMEs)manufacturing platform aims to perform as a significant revenue to SMEs and vendors by providing scheduling and monitoring capabilities.The optimal job shop scheduling is generated by utilizing the scheduling system of the platform,and a minimum production time,i.e.,makespan decides whether the scheduling is optimal or not.This scheduling result allows manufacturers to achieve high productivity,energy savings,and customer satisfaction.Manufacturing in Industry 4.0 requires dynamic,uncertain,complex production environments,and customer-centered services.This paper proposes a novel method for solving the difficulties of the SMEs manufacturing by applying and implementing the job shop scheduling system on a SMEs manufacturing platform.The primary purpose of the SMEs manufacturing platform is to improve the B2B relationship between manufacturing companies and vendors.The platform also serves qualified and satisfactory production opportunities for buyers and producers by meeting two key factors:early delivery date and fulfillment of processing as many orders as possible.The genetic algorithm(GA)-based scheduling method results indicated that the proposed platform enables SME manufacturers to obtain optimized schedules by solving the job shop scheduling problem(JSSP)by comparing with the real-world data from a textile weaving factory in South Korea.The proposed platform will provide producers with an optimal production schedule,introduce new producers to buyers,and eventually foster relationships and mutual economic interests.

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.

Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Job Shop Scheduling of Smart Manufacturing

Industry 4.0 production environments and smart manufacturing systems integrate both the physical and decision-making aspects of manufacturing operations into autonomous and decentralized systems.One of the key aspects of these systems is a production planning,specifically,Scheduling operations on the machines.To cope with this problem,this paper proposed a Deep Reinforcement Learning with an Actor-Critic algorithm(DRLAC).We model the Job-Shop Scheduling Problem(JSSP)as a Markov Decision Process(MDP),represent the state of a JSSP as simple Graph Isomorphism Networks(GIN)to extract nodes features during scheduling,and derive the policy of optimal scheduling which guides the included node features to the best next action of schedule.In addition,we adopt the Actor-Critic(AC)network’s training algorithm-based reinforcement learning for achieving the optimal policy of the scheduling.To prove the proposed model’s effectiveness,first,we will present a case study that illustrated a conflict between two job scheduling,secondly,we will apply the proposed model to a known benchmark dataset and compare the results with the traditional scheduling methods and trending approaches.The numerical results indicate that the proposed model can be adaptive with real-time production scheduling,where the average percentage deviation(APD)of our model achieved values between 0.009 and 0.21 comparedwith heuristic methods and values between 0.014 and 0.18 compared with other trending approaches.

Combined Timetabling Procedure and Complete Local Search for No-Wait Job Shop Scheduling with Total Tardiness

The strong non-deterministic polynomial-hard( NP-hard)character of job shop scheduling problem( JSSP) has been acknowledged widely and it becomes stronger when attaches the nowait constraint,which widely exists in many production processes,such as chemistry process, metallurgical process. However,compared with the massive research on traditional job shop problem,little attention has been paid on the no-wait constraint.Therefore,in this paper, we have dealt with this problem by decomposing it into two sub-problems, the timetabling and sequencing problems,in traditional frame work. A new efficient combined non-order timetabling method,coordinated with objective of total tardiness,is proposed for the timetabling problems. As for the sequencing one,we have presented a modified complete local search with memory combined by crossover operator and distance counting. The entire algorithm was tested on well-known benchmark problems and compared with several existing algorithms.Computational experiments showed that our proposed algorithm performed both effectively and efficiently.

A Promising Initial Population Based Genetic Algorithm for Job Shop Scheduling Problem

Job shop scheduling problem is typically a NP-Hard problem. In the recent past efforts put by researchers were to provide the most generic genetic algorithm to solve efficiently the job shop scheduling problems. Less attention has been paid to initial population aspects in genetic algorithms and much attention to recombination operators. Therefore authors are of the opinion that by proper design of all the aspects in genetic algorithms starting from initial population may provide better and promising solutions. Hence this paper attempts to enhance the effectiveness of genetic algorithm by providing a new look to initial population. This new technique along with job based representation has been used to obtain the optimal or near optimal solutions of 66 benchmark instances which comprise of varying degree of complexity.

Pareto-Based Complete Local Search and Combined Timetabling for Multi-objective Job Shop Scheduling Problem with No-Wait Constraint

Job shop scheduling has become the basis and core of advanced manufacturing technology. Various differences exist between academic research and practical production. The majority of previous researches on job shop scheduling problem (JSSP)describe the basic production environment, which have a single objective and limited constraints. However,a practical process of production is characterized by having multiple objectives,no-wait constraint,and limited storage. Thus this research focused on multiobjective,no-wait JSSP. To analyze the problem,it was further divided into two sub-problems, namely, sequencing and timetabling. Hybrid non-order strategy and modified complete local search with memory were used to solve each problem individually. A Pareto-based strategy for performing fitness assessment was presented in this study. Various experiments on benchmark problems proved the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Modified Shifting Bottleneck Heuristic for Scheduling Problems of Large-Scale Job Shops

A modified shifting bottleneck algorithm was proposed to solve scheduling problems of a large-scale job shop.Firstly,a new structured algorithm was employed for sub-problems so as to reduce the computational burden and suit for large-scale instances more effectively.The modified cycle avoidance method,incorporating with the disjunctive graph model and topological sort algorithm,was applied to guaranteeing the feasibility of solutions with considering delayed precedence constraints.Finally,simulation experiments were carried out to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the modified method.The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can solve the large-scale job shop scheduling problems(JSSPs) within a reasonable period of time and obtaining satisfactory solutions simultaneously.

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.

Deep Reinforcement Learning Solves Job-shop Scheduling Problems

To solve the sparse reward problem of job-shop scheduling by deep reinforcement learning,a deep reinforcement learning framework considering sparse reward problem is proposed.The job shop scheduling problem is transformed into Markov decision process,and six state features are designed to improve the state feature representation by using two-way scheduling method,including four state features that distinguish the optimal action and two state features that are related to the learning goal.An extended variant of graph isomorphic network GIN++is used to encode disjunction graphs to improve the performance and generalization ability of the model.Through iterative greedy algorithm,random strategy is generated as the initial strategy,and the action with the maximum information gain is selected to expand it to optimize the exploration ability of Actor-Critic algorithm.Through validation of the trained policy model on multiple public test data sets and comparison with other advanced DRL methods and scheduling rules,the proposed method reduces the minimum average gap by 3.49%,5.31%and 4.16%,respectively,compared with the priority rule-based method,and 5.34%compared with the learning-based method.11.97%and 5.02%,effectively improving the accuracy of DRL to solve the approximate solution of JSSP minimum completion time.

Modeling and Analysis of Production Logistics Spatio-Temporal Graph Network Driven by Digital Twin

In the process of logistics distribution of manufacturing enterprises, the automatic scheduling method based on the algorithm model has the advantages of accurate calculation and stable operation, but it excessively relies on the results of data calculation, ignores historical information and empirical data in the solving process, and has the bottleneck of low processing dimension and small processing scale. Therefore, in the digital twin(DT) system based on virtual and real fusion, a modeling and analysis method of production logistics spatio-temporal graph network model is proposed, considering the characteristics of road network topology and time-varying data. In the DT system, the temporal graph network model of the production logistics task is established and combined with the network topology, and the historical scheduling information about logistics elements is stored in the nodes. When the dynamic task arrives, a multi-stage links probability prediction method is adopted to predict the possibility of loading, driving, and other link relationships between task-related entity nodes at each stage. Several experiments are carried out, and the prediction accuracy of the digital twin-based temporal graph network(DTGN) model trained by historical scheduling information reaches 99.2% when the appropriate batch size is selected. Through logistics simulation experiments, the feasibility and the effectiveness of production logistics spatio-temporal graph network analysis methods based on historical scheduling information are verified.

Collaborative Clustering Parallel Reinforcement Learning for Edge-Cloud Digital Twins Manufacturing System

To realize high-accuracy physical-cyber digital twin(DT)mapping in a manufacturing system,a huge amount of data need to be collected and analyzed in real-time.Traditional DTs systems are deployed in cloud or edge servers independently,whilst it is hard to apply in real production systems due to the high interaction or execution delay.This results in a low consistency in the temporal dimension of the physical-cyber model.In this work,we propose a novel efficient edge-cloud DT manufacturing system,which is inspired by resource scheduling technology.Specifically,an edge-cloud collaborative DTs system deployment architecture is first constructed.Then,deterministic and uncertainty optimization adaptive strategies are presented to choose a more powerful server for running DT-based applications.We model the adaptive optimization problems as dynamic programming problems and propose a novel collaborative clustering parallel Q-learning(CCPQL)algorithm and prediction-based CCPQL to solve the problems.The proposed approach reduces the total delay with a higher convergence rate.Numerical simulation results are provided to validate the approach,which would have great potential in dynamic and complex industrial internet environments.

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.

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.

Improved Heuristic Job Scheduling Method to Enhance Throughput for Big Data Analytics

Data-parallel computing platforms,such as Hadoop and Spark,are deployed in computing clusters for big data analytics.There is a general tendency that multiple users share the same computing cluster.The schedule of multiple jobs becomes a serious challenge.Over a long period in the past,the Shortest-Job-First(SJF)method has been considered as the optimal solution to minimize the average job completion time.However,the SJF method leads to a low system throughput in the case where a small number of short jobs consume a large amount of resources.This factor prolongs the average job completion time.We propose an improved heuristic job scheduling method,called the Densest-Job-Set-First(DJSF)method.The DJSF method schedules jobs by maximizing the number of completed jobs per unit time,aiming to decrease the average Job Completion Time(JCT)and improve the system throughput.We perform extensive simulations based on Google cluster data.Compared with the SJF method,the DJSF method decreases the average JCT by 23.19% and enhances the system throughput by 42.19%.Compared with Tetris,the job packing method improves the job completion efficiency by 55.4%,so that the computing platforms complete more jobs in a short time span.

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.