Bi-Objective Modeling and Optimization for Stochastic Two-Stage Open Shop Scheduling Problems in the Sharing Economy

Abstract

Nowadays, many manufacturing and service industries prefer to share resources such as facilities and workers to cooperatively perform tasks, which can efficiently improve resource utilization and customer satisfaction. Generally, the decision-makers need to pay more for resource usage, leading to an urgent demand to decrease operational costs. This article proposes a stochastic bi-objective two-stage open shop scheduling problem that models a vehicle maintenance process where tasks are appointed to be completed by multiple third-party companies with professional equipment. We formulate this optimization problem by minimizing the total tardiness and processing cost subject to various resource constraints. A hybrid multiobjective migrating birds optimization combined with a genetic operation and a discrete event system is designed by considering problem characteristics to solve the problem. In this method, the migrating birds optimization with some particular strategies aims at searching candidate solutions from the entire solution domain. Simultaneously, the discrete event system, by using stochastic simulation and discrete event-based simulation approaches, focuses on evaluating the performance of searched solutions. Simulation experiments are performed, and state-of-the-art algorithms are used as competitive approaches. The results confirm that this approach has an excellent performance in handling our considered problem.