Ebook: Metaheuristics for Scheduling in Industrial and Manufacturing Applications

During the past decades scheduling has been among the most studied optimization problems and it is still an active area of research! Scheduling appears in many areas of science, engineering and industry and takes different forms depending on the restrictions and optimization criteria of the operating environments.

This book deals with the application of various novel metaheuristics in scheduling. Addressing the various issues of scheduling in industrial and manufacturing applications is the novelty of this edited volume. Important features include the detailed overview of the various novel metaheuristic scheduling approaches, excellent coverage of timely, advanced scheduling topics, state-of-the-art theoretical research and application developments and chapters authored by pioneers in the field. Academics, scientists as well as engineers engaged in research, development and scheduling will find the comprehensive coverage of this book invaluable.

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This volume presents meta-heuristics approaches for scheduling problems arising in industrial and manufacturing applications. Nowadays, metaheuristics have become a de facto approach to tackle in practice with the complexity of scheduling problems. Early work applied evolutionary computing methods to scheduling problems. The present volume is novel in many respects. First, the proposed approaches comprise a variety of meta-heuristics (Genetic Algorithms, Memetic Algorithms, Ant Colony Optimization, Particle Swarm Optimization, Tabu Search, Scatter Search, Variable Neighborhood Search). Second, in most cases, hybridization is approached as the most effective way to achieve state-of-the art results. Third, and most importantly, the scheduling problems arising in real life applications and real world data instances are solved using these meta-heuristics; these applications comprise reconfigurable manufacturing systems, lot sizing and scheduling in industry, railway scheduling and process, supply chain scheduling and scheduling problem arising in a real-world multi-commodity Oil-derivatives Pipeline. Finally, scheduling problems and meta-heuristics are presented in a comprehensive way making this volume and interesting contribution to the research on scheduling in industrial and manufacturing applications.