Reducing the total tardiness by Seru production: model, exact and cooperative coevolution solutions

Abstract

Seru Production is widely used in the Japanese electronics industry owing to its benefits. The total tardiness can be significantly reduced by Seru Production. We focus on investigating the fundamental principle of the total tardiness reduction brought by Seru Production. We formulate the seru system operation with minimising the total tardiness and analyse the solution space. We clarify that the model is non-linear. To exactly obtain the optimal solution of the non-linear model, we decompose the non-linear model into seru formation and seru scheduling which is formulated as a linear model. Thus, the small-scale seru system operation with minimising the total tardiness is solved exactly. For the large-scale problems, we propose a cooperative coevolution algorithm, where two evolution algorithms deal with the seru formation and seru scheduling. In the coevolution process, the two algorithms perform cooperation to seek the better solutions of seru system operation with minimising the total tardiness. Extensive experiments are tested to investigate how Seru Production reduces the total tardiness.

Keywords:

• cooperative coevolution
• due date
• exact algorithm
• manufacturing
• tardiness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71601089, 71831006, 71571156, 71571037, 71420107028 and 71620107003), by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (N160402002, N170405005 and N180704015), by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. [T32-101/15-R]), by the University of Hong Kong through the Seed Fund for Basic Research (Grant No. 201811159163), and by the open project funded by State Key Laboratory of Synthetical Automation for Process Industries (PAL-N201802).