Job shop scheduling based on earliness and tardiness penalties with due dates and deadlines: an enhanced genetic algorithm

Abstract

This paper studies a job shop scheduling problem with due dates and deadlines in the presence of tardiness and earliness penalties. Due dates are desired completion dates of jobs given by the customer, while deadlines are determined by the manufacturer based on customer due dates. Due dates can be violated at the cost of tardiness, whereas deadlines must be met and cannot be violated. The aforementioned scheduling problem, which is NP-hard, can be formulated with the objective function of minimizing the sum of weighted earliness and weighted tardiness of jobs subject to due dates and deadlines. In order to solve this problem, an enhanced genetic algorithm (EGA) is introduced in this paper. EGA utilizes an operation-based scheme to represent schedules as chromosomes. After the initial population of chromosomes is randomly generated, each chromosome is processed through a three-stage decoder, which first reduces tardiness based on due dates, second ensures deadlines are not violated, and finally reduces earliness based on due dates. After the population size is reached, EGA continues with selection, crossover, and mutation. The proposed algorithm is tested on 180 job shop scheduling problems of varying sizes and its performance is discussed.