Evolutionary multi-objective blocking lot-streaming flow shop scheduling with interval processing time

Abstract

A blocking lot-streaming flow shop scheduling problem with interval processing time has a wide range of applications in various industrial systems, however, not yet been well studied. In this paper, the problem is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem, where each interval objective is converted into a real-valued one using a dynamically weighted sum of its midpoint and radius. A novel evolutionary multi-objective optimization algorithm is then proposed to solve the re-formulated multi-objective optimization problem, in which non-dominated solutions and differences among parents are taken advantage of when designing the crossover operator, and an ideal-point assisted local search strategy for multi-objective optimization is employed to improve the exploitation capability of the algorithm. To empirically evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, a series of comparative experiments are conducted on 24 scheduling instances. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the compared algorithms in convergence, and is more capable of tackling uncertainties.