A bi-objective imperialist competitive algorithm for no-wait flexible flow lines with sequence dependent setup times

摘要

In field of scheduling, the majority of papers have assumed that setup times are negligible or independent of job sequence and can be added to processing times. While in some industries like textile, chemical, and automobile manufacturing, setup time is an important factor and must not be ignored. Despite its importance from both practical and academic aspects, multi-objective no-wait flexible flow line scheduling problems with sequence-dependent setup times have been given less attention. This paper considers this problem where the objective is to minimize both makespan and total tardiness. The problem is first mathematically formulated the problem as a mixed integer linear programming model. A novel bi-objective imperialist competitive algorithm is developed. This algorithm employs three advance mechanisms of imperialist behavior, imperialist completion, and independence. The algorithm is carefully evaluated for its performance against two well-known multi-objective algorithms. The results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the other algorithms.