A Multi-objective Approach for Solving Distributed Job Shop Scheduling Problems

Nowadays, the industrial market is characterised by high levels of competition, with customers increasingly demanding in terms of quality, delivery times, costs, etc.. However, with increasing demand and the need to increase productivity, many companies in recent years have dedicated themselves to decentralising their factories, thus moving to distributed production. Today’s manufacturing systems are distributed in the sense that there are several jobs that have to be carry out on machines located in different factories. This paper proposes a multi-objective distributed job shop scheduling model with unrelated parallel machines and sequence-dependent setup times. The transport time of raw materials to carry out a given job to a factory is also taken into account. Small instances of the problem were solved using NSGA-III with the aim of simultaneously minimising two objectives: the makespan and average completion time. Preliminary results show the validity of this approach.