New crossover operator in a hybrid genetic algorithm for the single machine scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times

Abstract

This paper presents a new crossover operator based on Constraint Based Scheduling (CBS) approach in a Genetic Algorithm (GA) for solving a scheduling problem. The proposed hybrid crossover, noted as HCX, is applied in Hybrid Genetic Algoritym (HGA) to a single machine scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times for the objective of minimizing the total tardiness. Through numerical experiments we compare the performance of the GA and the HGA approaches on different benchmarks from the literature. These results indicate that the HGA is very competitive and generates solutions that approach those of the known reference sets.