A Pareto archive floating search procedure for solving multi-objective flexible job shop scheduling problem

Flexible job shop scheduling problem is a key factor of using efficiently in production systems. This paper attempts to simultaneously optimize three objectives including minimization of the make span, total workload and maximum workload of jobs. Since the multi objective flexible job shop scheduling problem is strongly NP-Hard, an integrated heuristic approach has been used to solve it. The proposed approach was based on a floating search procedure that has used some heuristic algorithms. Within floating search procedure utilize local heuristic algorithms; it makes the considered problem into two sections including assigning and sequencing sub problem. First of all search is done upon assignment space achieving an acceptable solution and then search would continue on sequencing space based on a heuristic algorithm. This paper has used a multi-objective approach for producing Pareto solution. Thus proposed approach was adapted on NSGA II algorithm and evaluated Pareto-archives. The elements and parameters of the proposed algorithms were adjusted upon preliminary experiments. Finally, computational results were used to analyze efficiency of the proposed algorithm and this results showed that the proposed algorithm capable to produce efficient solutions.