Solving a bi-objective unrelated parallel batch processing machines scheduling problem: A comparison study

Nowadays in competitive markets, production organizations are looking to increase their efficiency and optimize manufacturing operations. In addition, batch processor machines (BPMs) are faster and cheaper to carry out operations; thus the performance of manufacturing systems is increased. This paper studies a production scheduling problem on unrelated parallel BPMs with considering the release time and ready time for jobs as well as batch capacity constraints. In unrelated parallel BPMs, modern machines are used in a production line side by side with older machines that have different purchasing costs; so this factor is introduced as a novel objective to calculate the optimum cost for purchasing various machines due to the budget. Thus, a new bi-objective mathematical model is presented to minimize the makespan (i.e., C_max), tardiness/earliness penalties and the purchasing cost of machines simultaneously. The presented model is first coded and solved by the ε-constraint? method. Because of the complexity of the NP-hard problem, exact methods are not able to optimally solve large-sized problems in a reasonable time. Therefore, we propose a multi-objective harmony search (MOHS) algorithm. the results are compared with the multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO), non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II), and multi-objective ant colony optimization algorithm (MOACO). To tune their parameters, the Taguchi method is used. The results are compared by five metrics that show the effectiveness of the proposed MOHS algorithm compared with the MOPSO, NSGA-II and MOACO. At last, the sensitivity of the model is analyzed on new parameters and impacts of each parameter are illustrated on bi- objective functions.