Evolutionary Algorithms for Customer Order Scheduling

The problem of customer order scheduling is investigated. The order of a customer consists of several products. We consider single-machine case and multi-machine case. In the first case when the unit is switched from one product to another a setup operation arises. In the second case dedicated machines are used for producing products without setup times. We consider the total completion time criterion. A genetic algorithm with optimized operators and a hybrid iterated local search combined with the “Go with the winners” approach are proposed. The results of the experimental evaluation are analysed on a series of benchmark instances and compared with state-of-the-art metaheuristics.