Solving distributed assembly blocking flowshop with order acceptance by knowledge-driven multiobjective algorithm

In the era of Industry 4.0, industrial artificial intelligence technologies make production planning and scheduling systems more flexible. A new distributed assembly blocking flowshop problem with order acceptance and scheduling decisions (DABFSP_OAS) was investigated in this paper. Specifically, three objectives—the makespan, total energy consumption (TEC), and total profit (TP)—were addressed simultaneously. To address this problem, we established a knowledge-driven non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II (KDNSGAII). First, three initialization schemes based on the problem-specific property were introduced to generate diverse initial population. Then, to accelerate the convergence process, we developed multiple Pareto-based crossover and mutation operators. In addition, two novel destructive reinsertion strategies based on product and job sequence length were implemented to enhance the development ability of the algorithm. Finally, the designed strategies were evaluated. Comparisons and discussions showed that the KDNSGAII outperformed the other state-of-art multi-objective algorithms in solving DABFSP_OAS.