An improved electromagnetism-like mechanism algorithm for energy-aware many-objective flexible job shop scheduling

Nowadays, most of the manufacturing industries rely on effective shop floor schedules to improve productivity and to optimize the makespan, production cost, tardiness, etc., which are usually considered in traditional scheduling problems. Recently, in response to the global initiatives for sustainability in manufacturing industries, an increasing number of shop floor schedules have taken energy consumption into account. However, few research works have considered traditional objectives, energy consumption, and other sustainability factors simultaneously in a shop floor schedule. In this paper, a many-objective optimization model for a flexible job shop scheduling problem considering makespan, total energy consumption, and three other indicators is formulated. Then, an improved electromagnetism-like mechanism algorithm is proposed to find the optimal or near-optimal solutions. Finally, a real-life case study is conducted to evaluate the proposed model and the algorithm. The results show that the many-objective model is effective for reducing energy consumption and improving sustainability in the shop floor.