Hyper-Heuristic Coevolution of Machine Assignment and Job Sequencing Rules for Multi-Objective Dynamic Flexible Job Shop Scheduling

Abstract

Nowadays, real-time scheduling is one of the key issues in cyber-physical system. In real production, dispatching rules are frequently used to react to disruptions. However, the man-made rules have strong problem relevance, and the quality of results depends on the problem itself. The motivation of this paper is to generate effective scheduling policies (SPs) through off-line learning and to implement the evolved SPs online for fast application. Thus, the dynamic scheduling effectiveness can be achieved, and it will save the cost of expertise and facilitate large-scale applications. Three types of hyper-heuristic methods were proposed in this paper for coevolution of the machine assignment rules and job sequencing rules to solve the multi-objective dynamic flexible job shop scheduling problem, including the multi-objective cooperative coevolution genetic programming with two sub-populations, the multi-objective genetic programming with two sub-trees, and the multi-objective genetic expression programming with two chromosomes. Both the training and testing results demonstrate that the CCGP-NSGAII method is more competitive than other evolutionary approaches. To investigate the generalization performance of the evolved SPs, the non-dominated SPs were applied to both the training and testing scenarios to compare with the 320 types of man-made SPs. The results reveal that the evolved SPs can discover more useful heuristics and behave more competitive than the man-made SPs in more complex scheduling scenarios. It also demonstrates that the evolved SPs have a strong generalization performance to be reused in new unobserved scheduling scenarios.