An effective and efficient divide-and-conquer algorithm for energy consumption optimisation problem in long Bernoulli serial lines

Reducing energy consumption in the energy-intensive production systems is of great significance and attracts more and more attention. Although a lot of efforts have been devoted to formulate and solve the energy consumption optimisation problem in the Bernoulli serial lines, existing methods for solving the problem in long Bernoulli lines either cannot obtain the optimal solution or are time-consuming. For this purpose, this paper divides the problem in the long line into a set of problems in two-machine lines and proposes a computationally efficient and globally convergent algorithm to solve it. Extensive numerical experiments show that the proposed algorithm not only can optimally (in the numerical way) solve the energy consumption optimisation problem in long Bernoulli serial lines, but also is orders of magnitude more efficient than existing algorithms.