An Enhanced Differential Evolution Algorithm with Fast Evaluating Strategies for TWT-NFSP with SSTs and RTs

Abstract EN

The no-wait flow-shop scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times and release times (i.e., the NFSP with SSTs and RTs) is a typical NP-hard problem.

This paper proposes an enhanced differential evolution algorithm with several fast evaluating strategies, namely, DE_FES, to minimize the total weighted tardiness objective (TWT) for the NFSP with SSTs and RTs.

In the proposed DE_FES, the DE-based search is adopted to perform global search for obtaining the promising regions or solutions in solution space, and a fast local search combined with three presented strategies is designed to execute exploitation from these obtained regions.

Test results and comparisons with two effective meta-heuristics show the effectiveness and robustness of DE_FES.