Plant scheduling and planning using mixed-integer hybrid differential evolution with multiplier updating

Plant scheduling and planning are two of the most important decision-making problems in manufacturing industry. In general, these two decision-making problems are complex, due to the features of combinatorial nature for production-strategy selection and coupling properties for constrained requirements. In this paper, we have developed two general mixed-integer nonlinear programming models to formulate the scheduling and planning problems. In order to obtain a global solution, mixed-integer hybrid differential evolution with a multiplier updating method is introduced to solve both constrained problems. The proposed method can use parameters to obtain a feasible solution as compared with the penalty function approach.