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An elitist quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm for the flexible job-shop scheduling problem

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Abstract

The flexible job shop scheduling problem (FJSP) is vital to manufacturers especially in today’s constantly changing environment. It is a strongly NP-hard problem and therefore metaheuristics or heuristics are usually pursued to solve it. Most of the existing metaheuristics and heuristics, however, have low efficiency in convergence speed. To overcome this drawback, this paper develops an elitist quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm. The algorithm aims to minimise the maximum completion time (makespan). It performs a global search with the quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm and a local search with a method that is inspired by the motion mechanism of the electrons around atomic nucleuses. Three novel algorithms are proposed and their effect on the whole search is discussed. The elitist strategy is adopted to prevent the optimal solution from being destroyed during the evolutionary process. The results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the best-known algorithms for FJSPs on most of the FJSP benchmarks.

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Acknowledgments

This paper is partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant (Grant No. 51305024) and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. FRF-TP-14-031A2). We greatly acknowledge the two anonymous reviewers and Professor Xin Yao from University of Birmingham, UK for their suggestions to improve the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, 100083, China

    Xiuli Wu

  2. Kent Business School, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7PE, UK

    Shaomin Wu

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  1. Xiuli Wu
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  2. Shaomin Wu
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Correspondence to Shaomin Wu.

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Wu, X., Wu, S. An elitist quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm for the flexible job-shop scheduling problem. J Intell Manuf 28, 1441–1457 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10845-015-1060-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10845-015-1060-6

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