An object-oriented approach for multi-objective flexible job-shop scheduling problem

Flexible manufacturing systems are very complex to control and it is difficult to generate controlling systems for this problem domain. Flexible job-shop scheduling problem (FJSP) is one of the instances in this domain. It is a problemwhich inherits the job-shop scheduling problem (JSP) characteristics. FJSP has additional routing sub-problem in addition to JSP. In routing sub-problem each operation is assigned to a machine out of a set of capablemachines. In scheduling sub-problem the sequence of assigned operations is obtainedwhile optimizing the objective function(s). In this paper an object-oriented (OO) approach is presented for multi-objective FJSP along with simulated annealing optimization algorithm. Solution approaches in the literature generally use two-string encoding scheme to represent this problem. However, OO analysis, design and programming methodology help to present this problem on a single encoding scheme effectively which result in a practical integration of the problem solution to manufacturing control systems where OO paradigm is frequently used. OO design of FJSP is achieved by using UML class diagram and this design reduces the problem encoding to a single data structure where operation object of FJSP could hold its data about alternative machines in its own data structure hierarchically. Many-to-many associations between operations and machines are transformed into two one-to-many associations by inserting a new class between them. Minimization of the following three objective functions are considered in this paper: maximum completion time, workload of the most loaded machine and total workload of all machines. Some benchmark sets are run in order to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. It is proved that using OO approach for multi-objective FJSP contributes to not only building effective manufacturing control systems but also achieving effective solutions. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.