Development of a genetic algorithm for scheduling products with a multi-level structure

This paper develops a genetic algorithm for scheduling products with a multi-level structure. The proposed approach explicitly considers due dates of products, operation sequences among items, and capacity constraints of the manufacturing system. The objective of the approach is to seek the minimum cost of both production idle time and tardiness or earliness penalty of an order. A representative example is illustrated to compare the GA-based approach with mixed integer programming (MIP). The results demonstrate that the suggested approach is satisfactory in producing effective schedules.