Simulated annealing and genetic algorithms for scheduling products with multi-level product structure

The authors consider a short-term production scheduling problem in a manufacturing system producing products with multi-level product structure, and their components and subassemblies. The problem is to schedule production of components, subassemblies, and final products with the objective of minimizing the weighted sum of tardiness and earliness of the items. The authors consider due dates of final products, precedence relationships among items, and processing capacity of the manufacturing system. The scheduling problem is solved with simulated annealing and genetic algorithms, which are search heuristics often used for global optimization in a complex search space. To compare the performance of these algorithms with the finite loading method, which is often used in practice, computational experiments are carried out using randomly generated test problems and results are reported.