Optimisation of the reverse scheduling problem by a modified genetic algorithm

Traditional scheduling methods can only arrange the operations on corresponding machines with appropriate sequences under pre-defined environments. This means that traditional scheduling methods require that all parameters to be determined before scheduling. However, real manufacturing systems often encounter many uncertain events. These will change the status of manufacturing systems. These may cause the original schedule to no longer be optimal or even to be infeasible. Traditional scheduling methods, however, cannot cope with these cases. New scheduling methods are needed. Among these new methods, one method ‘reverse scheduling’ has attracted more and more attentions. This paper focuses on the single-machine reverse scheduling problem and designs a modified genetic algorithm with a local search (MLGA) to solve it. To improve the performance of MLGA, efficient encoding, offspring update mechanism and a local search have been employed and developed. To verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed MLGA, 27 instances have been conducted and results have been compared with existing methods. The results show that the MLGA has achieved satisfactory improvement. This approach also has been applied to solve a real-world scheduling problem from one shipbuilding industry. The results show that the MLGA can bring some benefits.