Solving heterogeneous distributed no-wait flow shop scheduling problems by a cooperative multi-objective algorithm

Due to the needs of actual production, the production environment of many factories is distributed and heterogeneous. In this study, the distributed no-wait flow shop scheduling problem with heterogeneous factories considering economic indicators, environment criterion and customer satisfaction is researched for the first time, including hybrid and permutation flow shops. Firstly, a novel mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model is constructed by linear weighting the above three objectives. Then, using the characteristics of the optimization objectives, a cooperative initialization strategy is introduced to solve the problem in a framework of the classical multi-objective evolutionary algorithm NSGAII. A great number of numerical experiments demonstrate that the cooperative initialization strategy is efficient and can solve the practical problem effectively.