A HYBRID GENETIC ALGORITHM FOR A BI-OBJECTIVE SCHEDULING PROBLEM IN A FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING CELL

Abstract This paper considers a bi-objective scheduling problem in a flexible manufacturing cell (FMC) which minimizes the maximum completion time (i.e., makespan) and maximum tardiness simultaneously. A new mathematical model is considered to reflect all aspect of the manufacturing cell. This type of scheduling problem is known to be NP-hard. To cope with the complexity of such a hard problem, a genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed and hybridized by four priority dispatching rules. Different scheduling problems are generated at random and solved by both mathematical programming model and the proposed hybrid GA. The related results illustrate that this proposed algorithm performs well in terms of the efficiency and quality of the solutions.