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Multi-Agent Based Hyper-Heuristics for Multi-Objective Flexible Job Shop Scheduling: A Case Study in an Aero-Engine Blade Manufacturing Plant

In the paper, a case study focusing on multi-objective flexible job shop scheduling problem (MO-FJSP) in an aero-engine blade manufacturing plant is presented. The problem considered in this paper involves many attributes, including working calendar, due dates, and lot size. Moreover, dynamic events occur frequently in the shop-floor, making the problem more challenging and requiring real-time responses. Therefore, the priority-based methods are more suitable than the computationally intensive search-based methods for the online scheduling. However, developing an effective heuristic for online scheduling problem is a tedious work even for domain experts. Furthermore, the domain knowledge of the practical production scheduling needs to be integrated into the algorithm to guide the search direction, accelerate the convergence of the algorithm, and improve the solution quality. To this end, three multi-agent-based hyper-heuristics (MAHH) integrated with the prior knowledge of the shop floor are proposed to evolve scheduling policies (SPs) for the online scheduling problem. To evaluate the performance of evolved SPs, a 5-fold cross-validation method which is frequently used in machine learning is adopted to avoid the overfitting problem. Both the training and test results demonstrate that the bottleneck-agent-based hyper-heuristic method produces the best result among the three MAHH methods. Furthermore, both the effectiveness and the efficiency of the evolved SPs are verified by comparison with the well-known heuristics and two multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) algorithms on the practical case. The proposed method has been embedded in the manufacturing execution system that is built on JAVA and successfully applied in several manufacturing plants.