A genetic algorithm for flexible job-shop scheduling

Genetic algorithms have been applied to the scheduling of job shops - a class of very complicated combinatorial optimization problems. Among these algorithms for job shops, a common assumption is that the routes that jobs visit machines are fixed, this is not true for flexible job shops such as flexible manufacturing systems, where jobs have machine route flexibility. This paper presents a new genetic algorithm to solve the flexible job-shop scheduling problem with makespan criterion. The representation of solutions for the problem by chromosomes consists of two parts. The first part defines the routing policy and the second part the sequence of the operations on each machine. Genetic operators are introduced and used to the reproduction process of the algorithm. Numerical experiments show that our algorithm can find out high-quality schedules.