The Printed-Circuit-Board Electroplating Parallel-Tank Scheduling With Hoist And Group Constraints Using A Hybrid Guided Tabu Search Algorithm

Current research investigates a parallel-tank scheduling problem with hoist and group constraints in printed-circuit-board (PCB) electroplating environment, where the hoist is used as a material handling device and PCBs need to be grouped for further processing. The purpose of the current research is to minimize the makespan and total weighted tardiness of PCB products. The weighted ideal point method is used to combine these two objectives into a single optimization objective. Moreover, a mixed integer programming model is developed to formulate the problem. Since the problem is proved to be NP-hard, a hybrid guided tabu search (HGTS) algorithm is proposed to optimize the objectives. A heuristic method based on small combination sequences called SCS is applied to search the better initial solution. Moreover, a problem-oriented guided neighborhood move strategy is adopted to improve the search efficiency in the proposed HGTS algorithm. The experiments are conducted on different size of problem instances. The performance of the proposed HGTS algorithm is investigated and compared with other existing algorithms. The detailed results indicate that the proposed HGTS algorithm performs better both in objective value and convergence speed. Finally, a real-world case is solved by the proposed HGTS, which validates that the proposed algorithm is effective and useful in solving the practical electroplating scheduling problem.