An imperialist competetive algorithm for multi agent scheduling problem under periodic maintenance

Scheduling with availability constraint and maintenance activity has been widely studied. However,multi-agent scheduling with simultaneous considerations of availability constraint and maintenanceactivity has hardly been considered until now. In view of this, this research focuses on the problem ofscheduling jobs that come from two agent on a single machine that requires periodic maintenance with the objective of minimizing the total completion time of the jobs of the first agent while keeping the maximum tardiness of other agent below or at a fixed level UB. We present some new dominanceproperties for this strongly NP-hard problem. Next, using these properties, we develop a novel imperialist competitive algorithm for the problem. For the evaluation of the proposed ICA, problem data was generated to compare it against a genetic algorithm. The results of computational experiments show the good performance of the proposed algorithm.

Keywords:

Scheduling , Two agents , Single machine , availability constraint , imperialist competitive algorithm