Setup coordination between two stages of a production system: a multi-objective evolutionary approach

This paper describes the application of evolutionary algorithms to a typical multi-objective problem of serial production systems, in which two consecutive departments must organize their internal work, each taking into account the requirements of the other department. In particular, the paper compares three approaches based on different combinations of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms and local-search heuristics, using both small-size test instances and larger problems derived from an industrial production process. The analysis of the case-studies confirms the effectiveness of the evolutionary approaches, also enlightening the advantages and shortcomings of each considered algorithm