A Fitness Inheritance Evolutionary Algorithm for Solving Bi-criteria Flexible Process Sequencing Problems

This paper describes a novel fitness inheritance evolutionary algorithm for solving bi-criteria flexible process sequencing problems in flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs). FMS can be described as an integrated manufacturing system consisting of machines, computers, robots, and automated guided vehicles (AGVs). While FMSs give great advantages through the flexibility, FMSs pose complex problems on process sequencing of operations among multiple parts. Considering the machining time of operations and machine workload load balancing, the problem is formulated as bi-criteria flexible process sequencing problems (FPSs). An efficient multi-objective evolutionary algorithm with fitness inheritance mechanism is proposed to solve FPSs. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach can efficiently solve FPSs and fitness inheritance can speed up the convergence speed of the proposed algorithm.

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