Tabu search for no-wait flowshop scheduling problem to minimize maximum lateness

In order to solve the no-wait flowshop scheduling problem to minimize the maximum lateness,three job-block-based neighborhoods are proposed,among which the block exchange neighborhood have a size of O（n4）while the block swap and the simplified block exchange neighborhoods have a size of O（n3）.With larger sizes than the existing neighborhoods,the proposed neighborhoods can enhance the solution quality of local search algorithms.Speedup properties for the neighborhoods are developed,which can evaluate a neighbor in constant time and explore the neighborhoods in time proportional to their proposed sizes. Unlike the dominance-rule-based speedup method,the proposed speedups are applicable to any machine number.Three neighborhoods and the union of block swap and the simplified block exchange neighborhoods are compared in the tabu search.Computational results on benchmark instances show that three tabu search algorithms with O（n3）neighborhoods outperform the existing algorithms and the tabu search algorithm with the union has the best performance among all the tested algorithms.

A Heuristic Genetic Algorithm for No-Wait Flowshop Scheduling Problem

No-wait flowshop scheduling problems with the objective to minimize the total flow time is an important se-quencing problem in the field of developing production plans and has a wide engineering background. Genetic algo-rithm (GA) has the capability of global convergence and has been proven effective to solve NP-hard combinatorial op-timization problems,while simple heuristics have the advantage of fast local convergence and can be easily imple-mented. In order to avoid the defect of slow convergence or premature,a heuristic genetic algorithm is proposed by in-corporating the simple heuristics and local search into the traditional genetic algorithm. In this hybridized algorithm,the structural information of no-wait flowshops and high-effective heuristics are incorporated to design a new method for generating initial generation and a new crossover operator. The computational results show the developed heuristic ge-netic algorithm is efficient and the quality of its solution has advantage over the best known algorithm. It is suitable for solving the large scale practical problems and lays a foundation for the application of meta-heuristic algorithms in in-dustrial production.

Minimizing Total Tardiness in a Two-Machine Flowshop Scheduling Problem with Availability Constraints

In this paper,we consider the problem of minimizing the total tardiness in a deterministic two-machine permutationflowshop scheduling problem subject to release dates of jobs and known unavailability periods of machines.The theoretical and practical importance of minimizing tardiness inflowshop scheduling environment has motivated us to investigate and solve this interested two-machine scheduling problem.Methods that solve this important optimality criterion inflowshop environment are mainly heuristics.In fact,despite the N P-hardnessin the strong sense of the studied problem,to the best of our knowledge there are no approximate algorithms(constructive heuristics or metaheuristics)or an algorithm with worst case behavior bounds proposed to solve this problem.Thus,the design of new promising algorithms is desirable.We developfive metaheuristics for the problem under consideration.These metaheuristics are:the Particle Swarm Optimization(PSO),the Differential Evolution(DE),the Genetic Algorithm(GA),the Ant Colony Optimization(ACO)and the Imperialist Competitive Algorithm(ICA).All the proposed metaheuristics are population-based approaches.These metaheuristics have been improved by integrating different local search procedures in order to provide more satisfactory,especially in term of quality solutions.Computational experiments carried out on a large set of randomly generated instances provide evidence that the Imperialist Competitive Algorithm(ICA)records the best performances.

Scheduling a three-machine no-wait flowshop with separated setup time

In many practical flowshop production environments, there is no intermediate storage space available to keep partially completed jobs between any two machines. The workflow has to be continuous, implying that the no-wait conditions must be abided, which is typical in steel and plastic production. We discuss the three-machine no-wait flowshop scheduling problem where the setup times are considered as separated from processing times and sequence independent. The scheduling goal is to minimize the total flowtime. An optimal property and two heuristic algorithms for this problem are proposed. Evaluated over a large number of problems, the proposed heuristics are found that they can yield good solutions effectively with low computational complexity, and have more obvious advantage for the large size problem compared with the existing one.

HEURISTIC STUDY OF FLOWSHOP SCHEDULING TO MINIMIZE MEAN FLOW TIME WITH LOT TRANSFER CONSIDERED

Lot scheduling problem with idle time transfer between processes to minimize mean flow time is very important because to minimize mean flow time is to minimize work in process. But the problem is NP hard and no polynomial algorithm exists to guarantee optimal solution. Based the analysis the mathematical structure of the problem, the paper presents a new heuristic algorithm. Computer simulation shows that the proposed heuristic algorithm performs well in terms of both quality of solution and execution speed.

Hybrid artificial immune system and extremal optimization algorithm for permutation flowshop scheduling problem

The permutation flowshop scheduling problem （PFSP） is one of the most well-known and well-studied production scheduling problems with strong industrial background. This paper presents a new hybrid optimization algorithm which combines the strong global search ability of artificial immune system （AIS） with a strong local search ability of extremal optimization （EO） algorithm. The proposed algorithm is applied to a set of benchmark problems with a makespan criterion. Performance of the algorithm is evaluated. Comparison results indicate that this new method is an effective and competitive approach to the PFSP.

A hybrid two-stage fexible flowshop scheduling problem with m identical parallel machines and a burn-in processor separately

A hybrid two-stage flowshop scheduling problem was considered which involves m identical parallel machines at Stage 1 and a burn-in processor M at Stage 2, and the makespan was taken as the minimization objective. This scheduling problem is NP-hard in general. We divide it into eight subcases. Except for the following two subcases： （1） b≥ an, max{m, B} 〈 n; （2） a1 ≤ b ≤ an, m ≤ B 〈 n, for all other subcases, their NP-hardness was proved or pointed out, corresponding approximation algorithms were conducted and their worst-case performances were estimated. In all these approximation algorithms, the Multifit and PTAS algorithms were respectively used, as the jobs were scheduled in m identical parallel machines.

A Cross Entropy-Genetic Algorithm for m-Machines No-Wait Job-ShopScheduling Problem

No-wait job-shop scheduling (NWJSS) problem is one of the classical scheduling problems that exist on many kinds of industry with no-wait constraint, such as metal working, plastic, chemical, and food industries. Several methods have been proposed to solve this problem, both exact (i.e. integer programming) and metaheuristic methods. Cross entropy (CE), as a new metaheuristic, can be an alternative method to solve NWJSS problem. This method has been used in combinatorial optimization, as well as multi-external optimization and rare-event simulation. On these problems, CE implementation results an optimal value with less computational time in average. However, using original CE to solve large scale NWJSS requires high computational time. Considering this shortcoming, this paper proposed a hybrid of cross entropy with genetic algorithm (GA), called CEGA, on m-machines NWJSS. The results are compared with other metaheuritics: Genetic Algorithm-Simulated Annealing (GASA) and hybrid tabu search. The results showed that CEGA providing better or at least equal makespans in comparison with the other two methods.

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 Branch-and-Bound Based Heuristic Algorithm for Minimizing Makespan in Machining-Assembly Flowshop Scheduling

This paper proposes a heuristic algorithm, called list-based squeezing branch and bound algorithm, for solving a machine-fixed, machining-assembly flowshop scheduling problem to minimize makespan. The machine-fixed, machining-assembly flowshop consists of some parallel two-machine flow lines at a machining stage and one robot at an assembly stage. Since an optimal schedule for this problem is not always a permutation schedule, the proposed algorithm first finds a promising permutation schedule, and then searches better non-permutation schedules near the promising permutation schedule in an enumerative manner by elaborating a branching procedure in a branch and bound algorithm. The results of numerical experiments show that the proposed algorithm can efficiently provide an optimal or a near-optimal schedule with high accuracy such as mean relative error being less than 0.2% and the maximum relative error being at most 3%.

A Genetic Algorithm for the Flowshop Scheduling Problem

The flowshop scheduling problem is NP complete. To solve it by genetic algorithm, an efficient crossover operator is designed. Compared with another crossover operator, this one often finds a better solution within the same time.

A Heuristic Algorithm for the Two-Machine Flowshop Group Scheduling Problem

This paper presents the two-machine flowshop group scheduling problem with the optimal objective of maximum lateness. A dominance rule within group and a dominance rule between groups are established. These dominance rules along with a previously established dominance rule are used to develop a heuristic algorithm. Experimental results are given and analyzed.

Algorithms for Assembly Type Flowshop Scheduling Problem

An assembly type flowshop scheduling problem with minimizing makespan is considered in this paper. The problem of scheduling for minimizing makespan is first addressed, and then a new heuristic algorithm is proposed for it.

Objective increment based metaheuristic for total flowtime minimization in no-wait flowshops

To solve the NP-complete no-wait flowshop problems, objective increment properties are analyzed and proved for fundamental operations of heuristics. With these properties, whether a new generated schedule is better or worse than the original one is only evaluated by objective increments, instead of completely calculating objective values as the traditional algorithms do, so that the computational time can be considerably reduced. An objective increment-based hybrid genetic algorithm （IGA） is proposed by integrating the genetic algorithm （GA） with an improved various neighborhood search （VNS）as a local search. An initial solution generation heuristic（ISG） is constructed to generate one individual of the initial population. An expectation value-based selection mechanism and a crossover operator are introduced to the mating process. The IGA is compared with the traditional GA and two best-so-far algorithms for the considered problem on 110 benchmark instances. An experimental results show that the IGA outperforms the others in effectiveness although with a little more time consumption.

An improved artificial bee colony algorithm for steelmaking–refining–continuous casting scheduling problem

Steelmaking–refining–Continuous Casting(SCC) scheduling is a worldwide problem, which is NP-hard. Effective SCC scheduling algorithms can help to enhance productivity, and thus make significant monetary savings. This paper develops an Improved Artificial Bee Colony(IABC) algorithm for the SCC scheduling. In the proposed IABC, charge permutation is employed to represent the solutions. In the population initialization, several solutions with certain quality are produced by a heuristic while others are generated randomly. Two variable neighborhood search neighborhood operators are devised to generate new high-quality solutions for the employed bee and onlooker bee phases, respectively. Meanwhile, in order to enhance the exploitation ability, a control parameter is introduced to conduct the search of onlooker bee phase. Moreover, to enhance the exploration ability,the new generated solutions are accepted with a control acceptance criterion. In the scout bee phase, the solution corresponding to a scout bee is updated by performing three swap operators and three insert operators with equal probability. Computational comparisons against several recent algorithms and a state-of-the-art SCC scheduling algorithm have demonstrated the strength and superiority of the IABC.

Improved Fruit Fly Optimization Algorithm for Solving Lot-Streaming Flow-Shop Scheduling Problem

An improved fruit fly optimization algorithm( iFOA) is proposed for solving the lot-streaming flow-shop scheduling problem( LSFSP) with equal-size sub-lots. In the proposed iFOA,a solution is encoded as two vectors to determine the splitting of jobs and the sequence of the sub-lots simultaneously. Based on the encoding scheme,three kinds of neighborhoods are developed for generating new solutions. To well balance the exploitation and exploration,two main search procedures are designed within the evolutionary search framework of the iFOA,including the neighborhood-based search( smell-vision-based search) and the global cooperation-based search. Finally,numerical testing results are provided,and the comparisons demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed iFOA for solving the LSFSP.

Flow-Shop Scheduling with Transportation Capacity and Time Consideration

Planning and scheduling is one of the most important activity in supply chain operation management.Over the years,there have been multiple researches regarding planning and scheduling which are applied to improve a variety of supply chains.This includes two commonly used methods which are mathematical programming models and heuristics algorithms.Flowshop manufacturing systems are seen normally in industrial environments but few have considered certain constraints such as transportation capacity and transportation time within their supply chain.A two-stage flowshop of a single processing machine and a batch processing machine are considered with their capacity and transportation time between twomachines.The objectives of this research are to build a suitable mathematical model capable of minimizing the maximum completion time,to propose a heuristic optimization algorithm to solve the problem,and to develop an applicable program of the heuristics algorithm.AMixed Integer Programming(MIP)model and a heuristics optimization algorithmwas developed and tested using a randomly generated data set for feasibility.The overall results and performance of each approach was compared between the two methods that would assist the decision maker in choosing a suitable solution for their manufacturing line.

Multi-objective reconfigurable production line scheduling for smart home appliances

In a typical discrete manufacturing process,a new type of reconfigurable production line is introduced,which aims to help small-and mid-size enterprises to improve machine utilization and reduce production cost.In order to effectively handle the production scheduling problem for the manufacturing system,an improved multi-objective particle swarm optimization algorithm based on Brownian motion(MOPSO-BM)is proposed.Since the existing MOPSO algorithms are easily stuck in the local optimum,the global search ability of the proposed method is enhanced based on the random motion mechanism of the BM.To further strengthen the global search capacity,a strategy of fitting the inertia weight with the piecewise Gaussian cumulative distribution function(GCDF)is included,which helps to maintain an excellent convergence rate of the algorithm.Based on the commonly used indicators generational distance(GD)and hypervolume(HV),we compare the MOPSO-BM with several other latest algorithms on the benchmark functions,and it shows a better overall performance.Furthermore,for a real reconfigurable production line of smart home appliances,three algorithms,namely non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II(NSGA-II),decomposition-based MOPSO(dMOPSO)and MOPSO-BM,are applied to tackle the scheduling problem.It is demonstrated that MOPSO-BM outperforms the others in terms of convergence rate and quality of solutions.

No-Wait Flowshops to Minimize Total Tardiness with Setup Times

The m-machine no-wait flowshop scheduling problem is addressed where setup times are treated as separate from processing times. The objective is to minimize total tardiness. Different dispatching rules have been investigated and three were found to be superior. Two heuristics, a simulated annealing (SA) and a genetic algorithm (GA), have been proposed by using the best performing dispatching rule as the initial solution for SA, and the three superior dispatching rules as part of the initial population for GA. Moreover, improved versions of SA and GA are proposed using an insertion algorithm. Extensive computational experiments reveal that the improved versions of SA and GA perform about 95% better than SA and GA. The improved version of GA outperforms the improved version of SA by about 3.5%.

Sensitivity analysis for some scheduling problems

This paper gives the sensitivity analysis for some scheduling problems, including the following： what are the limits to a parameter change such that the solution remain optimal？ Given a specific change of a parameter, what is the new optimal cost？ Given a specific change of a parameter, what is a new optimal solution？ Here, the concern is mainly with the sensitivity analysis for some single-machine and flowshop scheduling problems with polynomial time algorithms. It is shown that, for these problems, the sensitivity analysis results depend on the positions of jobs with changed parameters.