Esmaeil Mehdizadeh - Department of Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Industrial and Mechanical engineering, Islamic Azad University (IAU) - Qazvin Branch Qazvin, Iran
Reza Tavakkoli-Moghaddam - Department of Industrial Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

There is a useful connection between vibrations damping and optimization problems. When energy source of an oscillator is cut, its amplitude reduces and gently converges to zero, because energy is dissipated by friction and other resistances. In this article we review the central constructs in vibration damping and then develop the similarities between vibration damping and optimization. Finally to test the power of vibration damping optimization (VDO) algorithm, we use this proposed algorithm for an identical parallel-machines scheduling problem with family setup times that minimizes the total weighted flow time. This problem is shown to be NP-hard in the strong sense. We computationally evaluate the performance of the proposed VDO solutions with the results obtained using genetic algorithms (GA). Finally, the related results show that the VDO outperforms the GA.

Parallel machines scheduling, Family setup times, Vibration damping optimization