Genetic programming for production scheduling: a survey with a unified framework

Abstract

Genetic programming has been a powerful technique for automated design of production scheduling heuristics. Many studies have shown that heuristics evolved by genetic programming can outperform many existing heuristics manually designed in the literature. The flexibility of genetic programming also allows it to discover very sophisticated heuristics to deal with complex and dynamic production environments. However, as compared to other applications of genetic programming or scheduling applications of other evolutionary computation techniques, the configurations and requirements of genetic programming for production scheduling are more complicated. In this paper, a unified framework for automated design of production scheduling heuristics with genetic programming is developed. The goal of the framework is to provide the researchers with the overall picture of how genetic programming can be applied for this task and the key components. The framework is also used to facilitate our discussions and analyses of existing studies in the field. Finally, this paper shows how knowledge from machine learning and operations research can be employed and how the current challenges can be addressed.