Title: A modified imperialist competitive algorithm for a two-agent single-machine scheduling under periodic maintenance consideration

Authors: Maziar Yazdani; Fariborz Jolai; Mohammad Taleghani; Reza Yazdani

Addresses: Faculty of Built Environment, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Department of Industrial Engineering, University College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran ' Department of Industrial Engineering, University College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran ' Department of Industrial Management, Rasht Branch, Islamic Azad University, Rasht, Guilan, Iran ' Department of Management, Tonekabon Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tonekabon, Mazandaran, Iran

Abstract: Scheduling with periodic maintenance has been widely studied. However, multi-agent scheduling with simultaneous considerations of periodic maintenance has hardly been considered until now. In view of this, this research focuses on the problem of scheduling jobs that come from two agents on a single machine under periodic maintenance constraint with the objective of minimising the total completion time of the jobs of the first agent while keeping the maximum tardiness of other agent below or at a fixed level UB. We present some new dominance properties for this strongly NP-hard problem. And next, using these properties, we develop a novel imperialist competitive algorithm for the problem. Various parameters of the proposed algorithm are reviewed by means of Taguchi experimental design. For the evaluation of the proposed ICA, problem data was generated to compare it against a genetic algorithm. The results of computational experiments show the good performance of the proposed algorithm.

Keywords: scheduling; two agents; single machine; periodic maintenance; imperialist competitive algorithm; ICA; dominance properties.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2018.092011

International Journal of Operational Research, 2018 Vol.32 No.2, pp.127 - 155

Received: 07 Jul 2014
Accepted: 02 Aug 2014
Published online: 30 May 2018 *

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