Self-adaptive multi-objective evolutionary algorithm for flexible job shop scheduling with fuzzy processing time

• The multi-objective FFJSP with two objectives is considered. • Problem-specific initial heuristic and VNS are designed. • A self-adaptive MOEA/D is proposed. • The results indicate the superior performance of our approach. With increasing environmental awareness and energy requirement, sustainable manufacturing has attracted growing attention. Meanwhile, there is a high level of uncertainty in practical processing procedure, particularly in flexible manufacturing systems. This study addresses the multi-objective flexible job shop scheduling problem with fuzzy processing time (MOFFJSP) to minimize the makespan and the total workload simultaneously. A mixed integer liner programming model is presented and a hybrid self-adaptive multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (HPEA) is proposed to handle this problem. HPEA has the following features: (i) two problem-specific initial rules considering triangular fuzzy number are presented for hybrid initialization to generate diverse solutions; (ii) five problem-specific local search methods are incorporated to enhance the exploitation; (iii) an effective solution selection method based on Tchebycheff decomposition strategy is utilized to balance the convergence and diversity; and (iv) a parameter selection strategy is proposed to improve the quality of non-dominated solutions. To verify the effectiveness of HPEA, it is compared against other well-known multi-objective optimization algorithms. The results demonstrate that HPEA outperforms these five state-of-the-art multi-objective optimization algorithms in solving MOFFJSP.