Metaheuristics for Production Scheduling

This book describes the potentialities of metaheuristics for solving production scheduling problems and the relationship between these two fields. For the past several years, there has been an increasing interest in using metaheuristic methods to solve scheduling problems. The main reasons for this are that such problems are generally hard to solve to optimality, as well as the fact that metaheuristics provide very good solutions in a reasonable time. The first part of the book presents eight applications of metaheuristics for solving various mono-objective scheduling problems. The second part is itself split into two, the first section being devoted to five multi-objective problems to which metaheuristics are adapted, while the second tackles various transportation problems related to the organization of production systems. Many real-world applications are presented by the authors, making this an invaluable resource for researchers and students in engineering, economics, mathematics and computer science.