A Genetic Hyper-Heuristic for an Order Scheduling Problem with Two Scenario-Dependent Parameters in a Parallel-Machine Environment

Studies on the customer order scheduling problem have been attracting increasing attention. Most current approaches consider that either component processing times for customer orders on each machine are constant or all customer orders are available at the outset of production planning. However, these assumptions do not hold in real-world applications. Uncertainty may be caused by multiple issues including a machine breakdown, the working environment changing, and workers' instability. On the basis of these factors, we introduced a parallel-machine customer order scheduling problem with two scenario-dependent component processing times, due dates, and ready times. The objective was to identify an appropriate and robust schedule for minimizing the maximum of the sum of weighted numbers of tardy orders among the considered scenarios. To solve this difficult problem, we derived a few dominant properties and a lower bound for determining an optimal solution. Subsequently, we considered three variants of Moore's algorithm, a genetic algorithm, and a genetic-algorithm-based hyper-heuristic that incorporated the proposed seven low-level heuristics to solve this problem. Finally, the performances of all proposed algorithms were evaluated.