A Genetic Algorithm for Flexible Job-Shop Scheduling

— Flexible Job Shop scheduling problem (FJSSP) is an important scheduling problem which has received considerable importance in the manufacturing domain. In this paper a genetic algorithm (GA) based scheduler is presented for flexible job shop problem to minimise makespan. The proposed approach implements a domain independent GA to solve this important class of problem. The scheduler is implemented in Microsoft Excel™ spreadsheet. The shop model is developed in the spreadsheet using the built in functions. Benchmark problems from the literature have been used to compare the performance of the proposed approach. The results show that the proposed approach is capable of achieving solutions comparable with earlier approaches used for the benchmark problems. It is also shown that the model can be easily customised to cater for any objective function without changing the basic GA routine thus making the proposed approach a robust and general purpose.