Robustness of Crossover Operation of Genetic Algorithm in a Production Ordering Problem
This paper deals with an optimal production ordering problem for a modified flowshop manufacturing process having multiple machines and a carrier. The carrier carries a product between the machines and the yards. The schedule condition includes the due date and the setup time of each product. The makespan, the lateness, the tardiness, the number of tardy products and the constant rate of production are considered, respectively, as the objective function. For obtaining a good suboptimal solution, the genetic algorithm (GA) is applied to this problem. Since cross over operation plays an important role in GA, five crossover operations are introduced for this problem. This paper aims at examining robustness of crossover operation, that is, which crossover operation can find a good solution regardless of variation of schedule conditions. Numerical results show that the most desirable opera tion is the order crossover from this viewpoint.