What is Total Earliness and Tardiness

Most research in production scheduling is concerned with the optimization of a single criterion. However, the analysis of the performance of a schedule often involves more than one aspect and therefore requires a multi-objective treatment. Therefore, in this research, the author makes use of one of the multiple objective decision-making methods, the min-max technique, to develop a new hybrid metaheuristic for solving sequence-dependent setup time hybrid flowshop scheduling problems with consideration of two performance measures, namely the makespan and the sum of the earliness and tardiness, simultaneously. In formulation of min-max type, the decision maker can have the flexibility of mixed use of weights and distance parameter in expressing desired improvement on produced Pareto optimal solutions. The proposed hybrid approach comprises two components: an electromagnetism-like algorithm and a tabu search to improve it. An extensive computational experience is carried out in order to analyze the different parameters of the combined algorithm. The comparison in the chapter shows the proposal to be very efficient for different structure instances.