A Metaheuristic to Solve a Robotic Cell Job-shop Scheduling Problem with Time Window Constraints

Abstract

This paper deals with a robotic cell job-shop scheduling problem with time window constraints. In this scene, jobs are processed successively on a set of machines. Specially, the loading/unloading of jobs between the machines is transported by robots. The aim is to minimize the total weighted earliness and tardiness. A novel metaheuristic is proposed to solve this problem. The proposed method combines a memetic algorithm and a powerful local search (variable neighborhood descent). The experiment results show that the proposed algorithm achieved better solution quality in comparison of other algorithms.