Abstract
A new jobshop scheduling problem with limited common buffers is dealt with in this paper. The standard genetic algorithm is not applicable to the present problem for deadlocks led by buffer constraints. A new algorithm is proposed by combining the genetic algorithm (GA) with a semi-active decoding which avoids deadlocks and satisfies the buffer constraints. Some benchmark problems appending with buffer constraints are tested by both the proposed GA and the multi-start local search method (MLS). Computation results show that the proposed GA outperforms MLS well. Computation is also made by varying the number of common buffers. These results are compared among the available results of the no-buffer jobshop problem and the normal jobshop problem. Consequently the results of the proposed GA are satisfactory.
