A Dispatching rule based Genetic Algorithm for Order Acceptance and Scheduling

Su Nguyen, Mengjie Zhang, Kay Chen Tan

Abstract: Order acceptance and scheduling is an interesting and chal- lenging scheduling problem in which two decisions need to be handled simultaneously. While the exact methods are not efficient and sometimes impractical, existing meta-heuristics proposed in the literature still have troubles dealing with large problem instances. In this paper, a dispatching rule based genetic algorithm is proposed to combine the advan- tages of existing dispatching rules/heuristics, genetic algo- rithm and local search. The results indicates that the pro- posed methods are effective and efficient when compared to a number of existing heuristics with a wide range of problem instances.