Application of genetic algorithms with dominant genes in a distributed scheduling problem in flexible manufacturing systems

Multi-factory production networks have increased in recent years. With the factories located in different geographic areas, companies can benefit from various advantages, such as closeness to their customers, and can respond faster to market changes. Products (jobs) in the network can usually be produced in more than one factory. However, each factory has its operations effiency, capacity, and utilization level. Allocation of jobs inappropriately in a factory will produce high cost, long lead time, overloading or idling resources, etc. This makes distributed scheduling more complicated than classical production scheduling problems because it has to determine how to allocate the jobs into suitable factories, and simultaneously determine the production scheduling in each factory as well. The problem is even more complicated when alternative production routing is allowed in the factories. This paper proposed a genetic algorithm with dominant genes to deal with distributed scheduling problems, especially in a flexible manufacturing system environment. The idea of dominant genes is to identify and record the critical genes in the chromosome and to enhance the performance of genetic search. To testify and benchmark the optimization reliability, the proposed algorithm has been compared with other approaches on several distributed scheduling problems. These comparisons demonstrate the importance of distributed scheduling and indicate the optimization reliability of the proposed algorithm.