An efficient genetic method for multi-objective continuous production scheduling in Industrial Internet of Things

Abstract

Continuous manufacturing is playing an increasingly important role in modern industry, while research on production scheduling mainly focuses on traditional batch processing scenarios. This paper provides an efficient genetic method to minimize energy cost, failure cost, conversion cost and tardiness cost involved in the continuous manufacturing. With the help of Industrial Internet of Things, a multi-objective optimization model is built based on acquired production and environment data. Compared with a conventional genetic algorithm, non-random initialization and elitist selection were applied in the proposed algorithm for better convergence speed. Problem specific constraints such as due date and precedence are evaluated in each generation. This method was demonstrated in the plant of a pasta manufacturer. In experiments of 71 jobs in a one-month window, near-optimal schedules were found with significant reductions in costs in comparison to the existing original schedule.