A self-learning hyper-heuristic for the distributed assembly blocking flow shop scheduling problem with total flowtime criterion

The distributed assembly blocking flow shop scheduling problem, which is a significant scenario in modern supply chains and manufacturing systems, has attracted significant attention from researchers and practitioners. To formulate the problem, a mixed-integer linear programming model is introduced to optimize the total flowtime. A constructive heuristic (HHNRa) and a self-learning hyper-heuristic (SLHH) are proposed to address the scheduling problem. HHNRa is designed based on the problem-specific knowledge to obtain initial solutions with high quality. A self-learning high-level strategy based on the historical success rate of low-level heuristics is presented to manipulate the low-level heuristics to operate in the solution space. In addition, a restart scheme with three distinct constructive heuristics is utilized to maintain the diversity of the solution. Based on 900 small-scale benchmark instances and 810 large-scale benchmark instances, comprehensive numerical experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed SLHH algorithm. The results of the statistical analysis indicate that the proposed self-learning hyper-heuristic is superior to the compared state-of-the-art algorithms for the problem under consideration. Consequently, the proposed constructive heuristic and the self-learning hyper-heuristic are effective methods for the distributed assembly blocking flow shop scheduling problem.