Modeling and Evolutionary Optimization on Multilevel Production Scheduling: A Case Study

Multilevel production scheduling problem is a typical combinatorialoptimization problem in a manufacturing system, which istraditionally modeled as several hierarchical sublevel problems and optimizedat each level, respectively. An integrated model, which can copewith the whole multilevel scheduling information simultaneously, is proposedin this paper, and a specific evolutionary algorithm is designedto solve the integrated model with a twin-screw coding strategy. In orderto evaluate the performance of the new algorithm, a real 3-level productionscheduling problem is employed for case study, and two typicalmetaheuristic algorithms, a genetic algorithm (GA) and a simulatedannealing (SA), are also employed for comparison study. Experimentalsimulation results show that our proposed modeling and optimizationmethod has outperformed the other ones