Knowledge Transfer Driven Distributed Memetic Architecture and Algorithm for Distributed Differentiation Flowshop Integrated Scheduling

Distributed manufacturing and fine-manufacturing are two typical scenarios of modern manufacturing industries in the context of globalization and customization. The distributed differentiation flowshop integrated scheduling problem (DDFISP) is a novel model that deals with the integrated scheduling problem of these two manufacturing scenarios. In the DDFISP, jobs have multiple customized types and are manufactured in a number of distributed factories. Each factory includes three fine-processing stages: 1) parallel machine fabrication; 2) single machine assembly; and 3) dedicated machine differentiation. In this article, a new distributed memetic evolutionary architecture is first built, which consists of four modules with distinct functions, including global exploration, local exploitation, knowledge transfer, and search restart. The exploration and exploitation are coevolved in the distributed way and communicated by knowledge transfer. This architecture can be used as a universal model to construct evolutionary algorithms. Following this architecture and devising each module innovatively, a novel knowledge transfer-driven distributed memetic algorithm (KTDMA) is constructed to solve the DDFISP. Specifically, global exploration is performed on multiple populations by dynamically selecting global exploration optimizers from predefined external repository. Local exploitation is executed on an independent elite archive by a destruction-construction local search and a key block local search. Knowledge transfer is conducted to communicate the superior information between exploration and exploitation based on a point-ring topology. Search restart is adaptively carried out to alleviate the search homogeneity. Computational results show the effectiveness of the proposed evolutionary architecture and special designs, and demonstrate that the KTDMA performs more competitive than the compared state-of-the-art algorithms.