Genetic Algorithm Approach to a Scheduling Problem in an Electric Wire Processing Process

Abstract

This paper deals with a scheduling problem in a real electric wire production process. The process is of a flow-shop with two processes. In each process plural equipments are arranged in parallel. The scheduling problem is large-scale and has complicated constraints. A genetic algorithm (GA) is applied to the problem. If GA is designed so as to search all solutions in the fundamental space, it is inefficient because the number of such solutions is enormous. On the other hand some dispatching rules can be applied to scheduling problems if they are effective. However it is not easy to find an effective rule for complicated production processes. In this paper, GA is designed in such a way that appropriate dispatching rules are combined with the conventional GA operator. Consequently, a part of decision variables are determined by appropriate rules and the others are determined by the operation of GA. The effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed by computational results.