Multi-Objective Production Scheduling of Perishable Products in Agri-Food Industry

Abstract

This paper deals with dynamic industry scheduling problem in agri-food production. The decision-making study in this paper is articulated around the management of perishable products under constrained resources. The scheduling of logistics operations is considered at the operational level. Two metaheuristics are proposed to solve dynamic scheduling under perturbations. The uncertainty sources considered in this study are the expiration date of product components and production delays. The proposed Genetic Algorithm (GA) and the Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm (ACO) take into consideration two objective functions: minimizing the makespan and reducing the number of perishable products. The algorithms are tested on a flow-shop agri-food system.

Keywords

• agri-food industry
• dynamic scheduling
• flow-shop system
• perishable product constraints
• branch and bound method (B&B)
• genetic algorithm (GA)