Reducing the total tardiness by Seru production: model, exact and cooperative coevolution solutions

Seru Production is widely used in the Japanese electronics industry owing to its benefits. The total tardiness can be significantly reduced by Seru Production. We focus on investigating the fundamental principle of the total tardiness reduction brought by Seru Production. We formulate the seru system operation with minimising the total tardiness and analyse the solution space. We clarify that the model is non-linear. To exactly obtain the optimal solution of the non-linear model, we decompose the non-linear model into seru formation and seru scheduling which is formulated as a linear model. Thus, the small-scale seru system operation with minimising the total tardiness is solved exactly. For the large-scale problems, we propose a cooperative coevolution algorithm, where two evolution algorithms deal with the seru formation and seru scheduling. In the coevolution process, the two algorithms perform cooperation to seek the better solutions of seru system operation with minimising the total tardiness. Extensive experiments are tested to investigate how Seru Production reduces the total tardiness.