A Genetic Programming-Based Evolutionary Approach for Flexible Job Shop Scheduling with Multiple Process Plans

This paper investigates a more general flexible job shop scheduling problem with multiple process plans which is common in the modern manufacturing system. As an extension of the traditional flexible job shop scheduling problem, various realistic flexibility such as processing flexibility, machine flexibility and sequencing flexibility are considered in this problem. Due to the high complexity and the real-time requirement of this problem, a genetic programming-based evolutionary approach is proposed to automatically generate effective dispatching rules for this problem, and an evaluation method is developed to evaluate the generated dispatching rules. Three experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach for real cases with large-scale test problems. Numerical results show that the proposed approach outperforms the classical dispatching rules and the state-of-the-art algorithms, and is able to provide higher-quality solutions with less computational time.