Title: A generalized resource constrained production scheduling problems: An evolutionary algorithm approach

Authors: Olli Kämäräinen, Vesa Ek, Kimmo Nieminen and Sampo Ruuth

Status: Proc. of the EUROGEN'99 - Short Course on Evolutionary lgorithms in Engineering and Computer Science (Eds. K. Miettinen, M.M. Mäkelä and J. Toivanen), May 30 - June 3, 1999, Jyväskylä, pp. 87-94.


Keywords: Genetic algorithm, Production scheduling, Combinatorial optimization

Many real world scheduling problems are large combinatorial optimization problems and can not generally be solved optimally in a reasonable computing time. We develop a genetic algorithm implementation for generalized resource constrained scheduling problems, where the objective is to schedule the operations subject to ready times, due dates, precedence relations and resource constraints in order to optimize the objective function. The scheduling procedure has two levels. A genetic algorithm is first used for determining the priorities of the operations. Then the schedule is calculated based on the priorities. The implementation will be applied to production scheduling problem of a silicon wafer manufacturer. Some experimental results with our algorithm will be discussed.