Hybrid flow shop scheduling considering machine electricity consumption cost

Hybrid flow shop (HFS) scheduling has been extensively examined and the main objective has been to improve production efficiency. However, limited attention has been paid to the consideration of energy consumption with the advent of green manufacturing. This paper proposes a new ant colony optimization (MOACO) meta-heuristic considering not only production efficiency but also electric power cost (EPC) with the presence of time-of-use (TOU) electricity prices. The solution is encoded as a permutation of jobs. A list schedule algorithm is applied to construct the sequence by artificial ants and generate a complete schedule. A right-shift procedure is then used to adjust the start time of operations aiming to minimize the EPC for the schedule. In terms of theoretical research aspect, the results from computational experiments indicate that the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed MOACO are comparable to NSGA-II and SPEA2. In terms of practical application aspect, the guideline about how to set preference over multiple objectives has been studied. This result has significant managerial implications in real life production. The parameter analysis also shows that durations of TOU periods and processing speed of machines have great influence on scheduling results as longer off-peak period and use of faster machines provide more flexibility for shifting high-energy operations to off-peak periods. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.