Title: An environment-driven, function-based approach to dynamic single-machine scheduling

Authors: Arezoo Atighehchian; Mohammad Mehdi Sepehri

Addresses: Department of Industrial Engineering, Tarbiat Modares University (TMU), 906 School of Engineering Building, Jalal-e Al-e Ahmad Highway, Tehran, Iran ' Department of Industrial Engineering, Tarbiat Modares University (TMU), 906 School of Engineering Building, Jalal-e Al-e Ahmad Highway, Tehran, Iran

Abstract: In this paper, the dynamic single-machine scheduling problem with a sequence-dependent setup time and with minimising total weighted tardiness of jobs as the objective is investigated. Due to the dynamic nature of the problem, a function-based approach is developed that can capture dynamic characteristics associated with the environment. In order to find a function which maps the environment's states to an action at each decision point, a combination of simulated annealing and a multi-layer feed-forward neural network is employed in an algorithm named SANN. The efficiency of the proposed function-based approach is compared with the most commonly used dispatching rules and with an agent-based approach, which employs the Q-learning algorithm to develop a decision-making policy. Numerical results reveal that the proposed approach outperforms dispatching rules and the Q-learning algorithm. The mean value of the results is about 93% better than the mean of the best results obtained with dispatching rules. [Received 4 January 2010; Revised 28 September 2010, 22 February 2011, 6 June 2011, 28 June 2011; Accepted 3 July 2011].

Keywords: dynamic scheduling; single machine scheduling; simulated annealing; multi-layer feedforward neural networks; sequence dependent setup times; total weighted tardiness.

DOI: 10.1504/EJIE.2013.051594

European Journal of Industrial Engineering, 2013 Vol.7 No.1, pp.100 - 118

Published online: 28 Feb 2014 *

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