Multi-Objective Genetic-Programming Hyper-Heuristic for Evolving Interpretable Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Rules

Junwei Pang, Yi Mei, Mengjie Zhang

Abstract: The job shop scheduling problem is an important combinatorial optimisation problem in the real world. Genetic programming hyper-heuristic has been successfully applied to automatically evolve effective dispatching rules to make a schedule in real time without much domain knowledge. However, the interpretability of GP-evolved rules has been largely neglected, which could lead to the lack of reliability and trustworthiness of the evolved rules in practice. Current work related to interpretable genetic programming algorithms primarily uses the model size as the interpretability metric. This could not fully reflect the interpretability of evolved rules. To overcome the limitation, we employ structural complexity and dimension gap as more comprehensive interpretability measures. In addition, a new multi-objective genetic programming algorithm, which applies the a non-dominated sorting method to solve the objective selection bias issue, is proposed to optimise the makespan (scheduling objective), structural complexity and dimension gap simultaneously. A variety of experiments demonstrates the competitive performance of our proposed algorithm based on effectiveness, convergence and diversity. Furthermore, the semantics of evolved dispatching rules are analysed to show their better interpretability.