Application of heuristics for scheduling problem hard disk drive manufacturing

Abstract

The challenge in unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem of hard disk drive (HDD) industry is to determine the optimal job sequence that minimizes the makespan. Each job can be performed by more than one machine and each machine has different capacity. This research offers the methodology for solving the unrelated parallel machine scheduling to optimize the makespan and tardiness. This problem is very difficult to solve by conventional mathematical programming. Hence, this research applies Firefly Algorithm to solve the problem. The experiment was conducted to find the suitable parameters for the scheduling problem based on past studies. In addition,two enhancement techniques which are swap operator and adjustment operator are studied to improve theperformance of FA. The results show that nG should be set to 100*25,γ to 0.1, 0β to 1 and 0αto 1, respectively. Also, SO method yield slightly better makespan than the AO method for solving the medium and large size problems.When the results are compared with the original method, the proposed method could solve the case study problemwith less computational effort.

Keyword: Makespan, Firefly algorithm, Unrelated parallel machine, Scheduling problem