An adaptive multi-population genetic algorithm to solve the multi-objective group scheduling problem in hybrid flexible flowshop with sequence-dependent setup times

In this paper we consider a multi-objective group scheduling problem in hybrid flexible flowshop with sequence-dependent setup times by minimizing total weighted tardiness and maximum completion time simultaneously. Whereas these kinds of problems are NP-hard, thus we proposed a multi-population genetic algorithm (MPGA) to search Pareto optimal solution for it. This algorithm comprises two stages. First stage applies combined objective of mentioned objectives and second stage uses previous stage's results as an initial solution. In the second stage sub-population will be generated by re-arrangement of solutions of first stage. To evaluate performance of the proposed MPGA, it is compared with two distinguished benchmarks, multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA) and non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II), in three sizes of test problems: small, medium and large. The computational results show that this algorithm performs better than them.