The Role of Genetic Algorithms in Production Scheduling

The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the applicability of genetic algorithms to flowshop production scheduling. A summary of various conventional approaches to scheduling theory is presented, along with a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages associated with these methods. A description of the genetic algorithm proposed by this research is described in detailed. The proposed algorithm is compared to a typical heuristic (Least-Work-Remaining first) on a test problem. The proposed approach for implementing a genetic algorithm for production scheduling proves to be quite promising.