Title: An evolutionary algorithm for a hybrid flowshop scheduling problem with consistent sublots

Authors: Xinli Zhang; Biao Zhang; Leilei Meng; Yaping Ren; Ronghua Meng; Junqing Li

Addresses: School of Mathematic Science, Liaocheng University, Liaocheng, 25200, China ' School of Computer Science, Liaocheng University, Liaocheng, 25200, China ' School of Computer Science, Liaocheng University, Liaocheng, 25200, China ' School of Intelligent Systems Science and Engineering, Jinan University, Zhuhai Campus, Zhuhai, 519000, China ' Hubei Key Laboratory of Hydroelectric Machinery Design & Maintenance, China Three Gorges University, Yichang 443002, China ' School of Computer Science, Liaocheng University, Liaocheng, 25200, China; School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, 250000, China

Abstract: Lot streaming is the most often used technique to support the time-based strategy in the modern manufacturing system, which can split the jobs (or lots) with larger size into several sublots with smaller size. With this manufacturing technique, this paper studies a hybrid flowshop scheduling problem with consistent sublots (HFSP_CS). With the consideration of the integrated optimisation of lot sequencing and lot splitting, a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model is established with the objective of minimising the total flowtime. Since the NP-hard property of the problem, a solution method integrating the migrating birds optimisation (MBO) and variable neighbourhood descent (VND) algorithms is developed. Moreover, by taking into account the problem-special characteristics, the two-layer coding mechanism and a corresponding initialisation method are designed. Some heuristic methods are also presented in the decoding process. In the computational study, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by comparing with CPLEX solver and other state-of-the-art algorithms.

Keywords: hybrid flowshop; lot streaming; consistent sublots; migrating birds optimisation; MBO.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAAC.2022.119418

International Journal of Automation and Control, 2022 Vol.16 No.1, pp.19 - 44

Received: 31 Aug 2019
Accepted: 04 Jan 2020
Published online: 03 Dec 2021 *

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