Optimal job scheduling to minimize total tardiness by dispatching rules and community evaluation chromosomes

Abstract

In traditional scheduling, job processing times are assumed to be fixed. However, this assumption may not be applicable in many realistic industrial processes. Using the job processing time of real industrial processes instead of a fixed value converts the deterministic model to a stochastic one. This study provides three approaches to solving the problem of stochastic scheduling: stochastic linguistic, stochastic scenarios, and stochastic probabilistic. A combinatorial algorithm, dispatching rules and community evaluation chromosomes (DRCEC) is developed to generate an optimal sequence to minimize the tardiness performance measure in the scheduling problem. Thirty-five datasets of scheduling problems are generated and tested with the model. The DRCEC is compared to the Genetic Algorithm (GA) in terms of total tardiness, the tendency of convergence, execution time, and accuracy. The DRCEC has been discovered to outperform the GA. The computational results show that the DRCEC approach gives the optimal response in 63 per cent of cases and the near-optimal solution in the remaining 37 per cent of cases. Finally, a manufacturing company case study demonstrates DRCEC's acceptable performance.