An ACO-based hyperheuristic with dynamic decision blocks for intercell scheduling

In real production of equipment manufacturing industry, coordination between cells is needed. Intercell scheduling therefore comes into being. In this paper, a limited intercell transportation capacity constraint is taken into consideration, a hyperheuristic is proposed, which employs ant colony optimization to select appropriate heuristic rules for production scheduling and transportation scheduling. Moreover, dynamic decision blocks are introduced to the hyperheuristic to make a better balance between optimization performance and computation efficiency. Computational results show that, as compared with other approaches, the proposed approach performs much better with respect to minimizing total weighted tardiness while retaining low computational costs, and it is especially suitable for the problems with large sizes.