1999 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages 141-150
The SFSW developed in the previous paper was improved by incorporating the possibility of working on rainy days and the days after rainy days. Five levels of daily rainfall characterizing the possibility of working were introduced, replacing the original two levels of weather condition: rain and bright.
A new algorithm, named New SFSW (NSFSW), was applied to sugarcane harvesting scheduling problems, which were also solved with SFSW as reported in the previous paper. The optimization method was modified to reduce the time required for optimization. With the consideration of daily rainfall amount determining the possibility of working on rainy days and the following days, the calculated costs and optimum schedules decided by NSFSW were considerably different from those decided by SFSW.
