Solving an industrial shop scheduling problem using genetic algorithm

Abstract

Spool fabrication shop is an intermediate phase in the piping process for construction projects. The delivery of pipe spools at the right time in order to be installed in the site is very important. Therefore, effective scheduling and controlling of the fabrication shop has a direct effect on the productivity and successfulness of the whole construction projects. In this paper, a genetic algorithm (GA) is developed to create an active schedule for the operational level of pipe spool fabrication. In the proposed algorithm, an enhanced solution coding is used to suitably represent a schedule for the fabrication shop. The initial population is generated randomly in the initialization stage and precedence preserving order-based crossover (POX) and uniform crossover are used appropriately. In addition, different mutation operators are used. The proposed algorithm is applied with the collected data that consist of operations processing time from an industrial fabrication shop. The results showed that by using GA for scheduling the fabrication processes, the productivity of the spool fabrication shop has increased by 88 percent.