Multi-Objective Population-based Optimization Algorithms for Scheduling of Manufacturing Entities

The contemporary manufacturing systems face a challenging and uncertain future due to frequent customer demands for customized products. A promising direction that can enable manufacturing systems to fulfill the market requirements is the adaptation of a reconfigurable manufacturing system paradigm. Physical reconfigurability can be achieved by developing systems that can satisfy conflicting production priorities such as minimal production time and maximal profit. Having that in mind, in this paper, the authors present a comprehensive analysis of population-based multi-objective optimization algorithms utilized for scheduling manufacturing entities. The output of multi-objective optimization is a set of Pareto optimal solutions in the form of production scheduling plans with transportation constraints. Three state-of-the-art population-based algorithms i.e., Genetic Algorithm (GA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), and Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA), are employed for optimization, while the experimental results show the effectiveness and superiority of the WOA algorithm.