Title: Multi-objective job shop scheduling using hybrid differential evolution approach

Authors: G. Balaraju, Sriram Venkatesh, B. Siva Prasad Reddy

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, University College of Engineering, Osmania University, Hyderabad – 500007, Andhra Pradesh, India. ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, University College of Engineering, Osmania University, Hyderabad – 500007, Andhra Pradesh, India. ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Kakatiya Institute of Technology & Science, Warangal – 506015, Andhra Pradesh, India

Abstract: Many real world scheduling problems involve simultaneous optimisation of multiple objectives and the trade-off between the objectives is crucial. The present work is an attempt to address the multi-objective job shop scheduling using a hybrid differential evolution approach. The objectives considered in the study are minimisation of makespan, mean flow time and mean tardiness. The operation schedule is generated using random keys encoding scheme which deals with the floating point vectors. A local search heuristic is embedded in the algorithm to achieve the best optimal solution. The proposed approach is tested on various job shop scheduling instances reported in the literature and it is observed that the proposed approach is performing well on all the test problems.

Keywords: job shop scheduling; differential evolution; random keys; makespan; Pareto front; local search; multiobjective scheduling; mean flow time; mean tardiness; floating point vectors.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAOM.2011.042136

International Journal of Advanced Operations Management, 2011 Vol.3 No.2, pp.122 - 140

Published online: 30 Sep 2014 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article