Automated generation of dispatching rules for the green unrelated machines scheduling problem

Abstract

The concept of green scheduling, which deals with the environmental impact of the scheduling process, is becoming increasingly important due to growing environmental concerns. Most green scheduling problem variants focus on modelling the energy consumption during the execution of the schedule. However, the dynamic unrelated machines environment is rarely considered, mainly because it is difficult to manually design simple heuristics, called dispatching rules (DRs), which are suitable for solving dynamic, non-standard scheduling problems. Using hyperheuristics, especially genetic programming (GP), alleviates the problem since it enables the automatic design of new DRs. In this study, we apply GP to automatically design DRs for solving the green scheduling problem in the unrelated machines environment under dynamic conditions. The total energy consumed during the system execution is optimised along with two standard scheduling criteria. The three most commonly investigated green scheduling problem variants from the literature are selected, and GP is adapted to generate appropriate DRs for each. The experiments show that GP-generated DRs efficiently solve the problem under dynamic conditions, providing a trade-off between optimising standard and energy-related criteria.