Solving Multi-stage, Multi-machine, Multi-product Scheduling Problems

Abstract. Companies that produce capital goods need to schedule the production of products that have complex product structures with components that require many operations on different machines. A feasible schedule must satisfy operation and assembly precedence constraints. It is also important to avoid deadlock situations. In this paper a Genetic Algorithm (GA) has been developed that includes a new repair process that rectifies infeasi-ble schedules that are produced during the evolution process. The algorithm was designed to minimise the com-bination of earliness and tardiness penalties and took into account finite capacity constraints. Three different sized problems were obtained from a collaborating capital goods company. A design of experimental approach was used to systematically identify that the best genetic operators and GA parameters for each size of problem