A hybrid neural network–genetic algorithm approach for permutation flow shop scheduling

The objective of this paper is to find a sequence of jobs for the permutation flow shop to minimise the makespan. The shop consists of 10 machines. A feed-forward back-propagation artificial neural network (ANN) is used to solve the problem. The network is trained with the optimal sequences for five-, six- and seven-job problems. This trained network is then used to solve a problem with a greater number of jobs. The sequence obtained using the neural network is used to generate the initial population for the genetic algorithm (GA) using the random insertion perturbation scheme (RIPS). The makespan of the sequence obtained by this approach (ANN-GA-RIPS) is compared with that obtained using GA starting with a random population (ANN-GA). It was found that the ANN-GA-RIPS approach performs better than ANN-GA starting with a random population. The results obtained are compared with those obtained using the Nawaz, Enscore and Ham (NEH) heuristic and upper bounds of Taillard's benchmark problems. ANN-GA-RIPS performs better than the NEH heuristic and the results are found to be within 5% of the upper bounds.

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