Energy-efficient no-wait permutation flow shop scheduling by adaptive multi-objective variable neighborhood search

Abstract This paper considers an energy-efficient no-wait permutation flow shop scheduling problem to minimize makespan and total energy consumption, simultaneously. The processing speeds of machines can be dynamically adjusted for different jobs. In general, lower processing speeds require less energy consumption but result in longer processing times, while higher speeds take the opposite effect. To reach the Pareto front of the problem, we propose an adaptive multi-objective variable neighborhood search (AM-VNS) algorithm. Specifically, we first design two basic speed adjusting heuristics which can reduce the energy consumption of a given solution without worsening its makespan. Two widely used neighborhood-generating operations, i.e., insertion and swap, are adapted and integrated into the variable neighborhood descent phase. With respect to their executing order, two variable neighborhood descent structures can be designed. We adopt an adaptive mechanism to dynamically determine which structure will be selected to handle the current solution. To further improve the performance of the algorithm, we develop a novel problem-specific shake procedure. We also introduce accelerating techniques to speed up the algorithm. Computational results show that the AM-VNS algorithm outperforms multi-objective evolutionary algorithms NSGA-II and SPEA-II.