A differential evolution algorithm for the customer order scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times

Abstract

Although the customer order scheduling problem to minimize the total completion time has received a lot of attention from researchers, the literature has not considered so far the case where there are sequence-dependent setups between jobs belonging to different orders, a case that may occurs in real-life scenarios. For this NP-hard problem we develop a novel efficient approximate solution procedure. More specifically, we develop an innovative discrete differential evolution algorithm where differential mutations are performed directly in the permutation space and that uses a novel, parameter-free, restart procedure. The so-obtained solutions are improved by two proposed local search mechanisms that employ problem-specific, heuristic dominance relations. We carry out an extensive computational experience with randomly generated test instances to compare our proposal with existing algorithms from related problems. In these experiments, the proposed algorithm obtains the best results in terms of their average relative percentage deviation and success rate. Furthermore, an analysis of variance test, followed by a Tukey’s test, confirms the excellent performance of the algorithm proposed.