Evolving Scheduling Heuristics via Genetic Programming With Feature Selection in Dynamic Flexible Job-Shop Scheduling

Zhang, Fangfang; Mei, Yi; Nguyen, Su; Zhang, Mengjie

doi:10.1109/tcyb.2020.3024849

“…Job shop scheduling (JSS) [150] is an important combinatorial optimisation problem, which captures practical issues in real-world applications such as grid/cloud computing [14], order picking in the warehouse [111], and manufacturing industry [80,219]. JSS has received widespread attention in both academia and industry due to its practical applications [137,242,251]. The job shop contains a number of jobs need to be processed by a set of machines.…”

Section: Job Shop Schedulingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Depending on whether the information of jobs is known in advance or not, JSS can be classified as static (classical) JSS or dynamic JSS [175]. Depending on whether a job can be processed on more than one machine, JSS can be categorised into flexible JSS and non-flexible JSS [242].…”

Section: Job Shop Schedulingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Genetic Programming Hyper-heuristics for Dynamic Flexible Job Shop Scheduling

Zhang¹

2021

Preprint

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Dynamic flexible job shop scheduling (DFJSS) has received widespread attention from academia and industry due to its reflection in real-world scheduling applications such as order picking in the warehouse and the manufacturing industry. It requires complex routing and sequencing decisions under unpredicted dynamic events. Genetic programming, as ahyper-heuristic approach (GPHH), has been successfully applied to evolve scheduling heuristics for DFJSS automatically due to its flexible representation. Although GPHH has achieved certain success in solving the DFJSS problems, there are still some limitations for applying GPHH to DFJSS, particularly in terms of its training efficiency, large search space, search mechanism, and multitask solving ability. The overall goal of this thesis is to develop effective GPHH algorithmsto evolve scheduling heuristics for DFJSS efficiently. Different machine learning techniques, i.e., surrogate, feature selection, specialised genetic operator, and multitask learning, are incorporated in this thesis to tackle the limitations. First, this thesis develops a novel multi-fidelity based surrogate-assisted GPHH for DFJSS to improve the training efficiency of GPHH. Specifically, multi-fidelity based surrogate models are first designed by simplifying the problem to be solved. Then, an effective collaboration mechanism with knowledge transfer is proposed for utilising the advantages of the multifidelity based surrogate models to solve the problem. The results show that the proposed algorithm can dramatically reduce the computational cost of GPHH without sacrificing the performance in all the test scenarios. With the same training time, the proposed algorithm can achieve significantly better performance than its counterparts in most scenarios while no worse in others. Second, this thesis designs a novel two-stage GPHH framework with feature selection to evolve scheduling heuristics for DFJSS automatically. Based on this framework, this thesis further proposes to evolve scheduling heuristics with only the selected features by eliminating the unselected features properly. Specifically, individual adaptation strategies are proposed to generate individuals with only the selected features by utilising the information of both the selected features and the investigated individuals during the feature selection process. The results show that the proposed algorithm can successfully achieve scheduling heuristics with fewer unique features and smaller sizes, which tends to be more interpretable. In addition, the proposed algorithm can evolve comparable scheduling heuristic with that obtained by the traditional GPHH within a much shorter training time. Third, this thesis proposes a novel recombinative mechanism to provide guidance for GPHH based on the importance of subtrees to realise effective and adaptive recombination for parents to produce offspring. Two measures are proposed to measure the importance of all the subtrees of an individual. The first one is based on the frequency of features, and the second is based on the correlation between the behaviour of subtrees and the whole tree (i.e., an individual). The importance information is utilised to decide the crossover points for the parents. The proposed recombinative guidance mechanism attempts to improve the quality of offspring by preserving the promising building-blocks of one parent and incorporating good building-blocks from the other. The results show that the proposed algorithm based on the correlation importance measure performs better than the proposed algorithm based on the feature frequency importance measure. In addition, the proposed algorithm based on the correlation importance measure between the behaviour of subtrees significantly also outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms on most tested scenarios. Last, this thesis proposes a multitask GPHH approach and a surrogate-assisted multitask GPHH approach to solving multiple DFJSS tasks simultaneously. First, an effective hyper-heuristic multitask algorithm is proposed by adapting the traditional evolutionary multitask algorithms based on the characteristics of GPHH. Second, this thesis develops a novel surrogate-assisted multitask GPHH approach to solving multiple DFJSS tasks by sharing useful knowledge between different DFJSS scheduling tasks. Specifically, the surrogate-assisted multitask GPHH algorithm employs the phenotypic characterisation technique to measure the behaviours of scheduling rules to build a surrogate for each task accordingly. The built surrogates are not only used to improve the efficiency of solving each single DFJSS task but also utilised for knowledge sharing between multiple DFJSS tasks in multitask learning. The results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the quality of scheduling heuristics for all the test scenarios. The results also observe that the proposed algorithms manage to solve multiple tasks collaboratively in terms of the evolved scheduling heuristics for different tasks in a multitask scenario.

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“…Comprehensive comparison among a large number of dispatching rules can be found in [212]. It is noted that a scheduling heuristic in DFJSS consists of a routing rule (i.e., for machine assignment) and a sequencing rule (i.e., for operation sequencing) [242,244]. Scheduling heuristics make decisions according to the priority values of machines or operations only at the decision points.…”

Section: Existing Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In addition, the designed heuristics are usually too specific to be reused in other scenarios. GPHH is naturally a good candidate to evolve scheduling heuristics automatically for DFJSS [158,173,242,249] due to its flexible representation.…”

Section: Existing Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The number of unique features is the number of different features needed to construct the rules. The number of unique features in the scheduling heuristics is one indicator of the complexity of evolved rules [242]. The smaller the number of unique features, the easier the scheduling heuris-tics to potentially interpret the rules.…”

Section: Number Of Unique Features Of Evolved Scheduling Heuristicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Genetic Programming Hyper-heuristics for Dynamic Flexible Job Shop Scheduling

Zhang¹

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Dynamic flexible job shop scheduling (DFJSS) has received widespread attention from academia and industry due to its reflection in real-world scheduling applications such as order picking in the warehouse and the manufacturing industry. It requires complex routing and sequencing decisions under unpredicted dynamic events. Genetic programming, as ahyper-heuristic approach (GPHH), has been successfully applied to evolve scheduling heuristics for DFJSS automatically due to its flexible representation. Although GPHH has achieved certain success in solving the DFJSS problems, there are still some limitations for applying GPHH to DFJSS, particularly in terms of its training efficiency, large search space, search mechanism, and multitask solving ability. The overall goal of this thesis is to develop effective GPHH algorithmsto evolve scheduling heuristics for DFJSS efficiently. Different machine learning techniques, i.e., surrogate, feature selection, specialised genetic operator, and multitask learning, are incorporated in this thesis to tackle the limitations. First, this thesis develops a novel multi-fidelity based surrogate-assisted GPHH for DFJSS to improve the training efficiency of GPHH. Specifically, multi-fidelity based surrogate models are first designed by simplifying the problem to be solved. Then, an effective collaboration mechanism with knowledge transfer is proposed for utilising the advantages of the multifidelity based surrogate models to solve the problem. The results show that the proposed algorithm can dramatically reduce the computational cost of GPHH without sacrificing the performance in all the test scenarios. With the same training time, the proposed algorithm can achieve significantly better performance than its counterparts in most scenarios while no worse in others. Second, this thesis designs a novel two-stage GPHH framework with feature selection to evolve scheduling heuristics for DFJSS automatically. Based on this framework, this thesis further proposes to evolve scheduling heuristics with only the selected features by eliminating the unselected features properly. Specifically, individual adaptation strategies are proposed to generate individuals with only the selected features by utilising the information of both the selected features and the investigated individuals during the feature selection process. The results show that the proposed algorithm can successfully achieve scheduling heuristics with fewer unique features and smaller sizes, which tends to be more interpretable. In addition, the proposed algorithm can evolve comparable scheduling heuristic with that obtained by the traditional GPHH within a much shorter training time. Third, this thesis proposes a novel recombinative mechanism to provide guidance for GPHH based on the importance of subtrees to realise effective and adaptive recombination for parents to produce offspring. Two measures are proposed to measure the importance of all the subtrees of an individual. The first one is based on the frequency of features, and the second is based on the correlation between the behaviour of subtrees and the whole tree (i.e., an individual). The importance information is utilised to decide the crossover points for the parents. The proposed recombinative guidance mechanism attempts to improve the quality of offspring by preserving the promising building-blocks of one parent and incorporating good building-blocks from the other. The results show that the proposed algorithm based on the correlation importance measure performs better than the proposed algorithm based on the feature frequency importance measure. In addition, the proposed algorithm based on the correlation importance measure between the behaviour of subtrees significantly also outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms on most tested scenarios. Last, this thesis proposes a multitask GPHH approach and a surrogate-assisted multitask GPHH approach to solving multiple DFJSS tasks simultaneously. First, an effective hyper-heuristic multitask algorithm is proposed by adapting the traditional evolutionary multitask algorithms based on the characteristics of GPHH. Second, this thesis develops a novel surrogate-assisted multitask GPHH approach to solving multiple DFJSS tasks by sharing useful knowledge between different DFJSS scheduling tasks. Specifically, the surrogate-assisted multitask GPHH algorithm employs the phenotypic characterisation technique to measure the behaviours of scheduling rules to build a surrogate for each task accordingly. The built surrogates are not only used to improve the efficiency of solving each single DFJSS task but also utilised for knowledge sharing between multiple DFJSS tasks in multitask learning. The results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the quality of scheduling heuristics for all the test scenarios. The results also observe that the proposed algorithms manage to solve multiple tasks collaboratively in terms of the evolved scheduling heuristics for different tasks in a multitask scenario.

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