An Improved Migrating Birds Optimization Algorithm for a Hybrid Flow Shop Scheduling within Steel Plants

Dayong Han, Qiuhua Tang, Zikai Zhang and Zixiang Li
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Dayong Han: Key Laboratory of Metallurgical Equipment and Control Technology of Ministry of Education, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Ministry of Education, Wuhan 430000, China
Qiuhua Tang: Key Laboratory of Metallurgical Equipment and Control Technology of Ministry of Education, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Ministry of Education, Wuhan 430000, China
Zikai Zhang: Key Laboratory of Metallurgical Equipment and Control Technology of Ministry of Education, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Ministry of Education, Wuhan 430000, China
Zixiang Li: Key Laboratory of Metallurgical Equipment and Control Technology of Ministry of Education, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Ministry of Education, Wuhan 430000, China

Mathematics, 2020, vol. 8, issue 10, 1-28

Abstract: Steelmaking and the continuous-casting (SCC) scheduling problem is a realistic hybrid flow shop scheduling problem with continuous-casting production at the last stage. This study considers the SCC scheduling problem with diverse products, which is a vital and difficult problem in steel plants. To tackle this problem, this study first presents the mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model to minimize the objective of makespan. Then, an improved migrating birds optimization algorithm (IMBO) is proposed to tackle this considered NP-hard problem. In the proposed IMBO, several improvements are employed to achieve the proper balance between exploration and exploitation. Specifically, a two-level decoding procedure is designed to achieve feasible solutions; the simulated annealing-based acceptance criterion is employed to ensure the diversity of the population and help the algorithm to escape from being trapped in local optima; a competitive mechanism is developed to emphasize exploitation capacity by searching around the most promising solution space. The computational experiments demonstrate that the proposed IMBO obtains competing performance and it outperforms seven other implemented algorithms in the comparative study.

Keywords: production scheduling; hybrid flow shop scheduling; steelmaking and continuous-casting; migrating birds optimization; MILP (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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