Applying Genetic Algorithm to Schedule Brewery Production

• Main Authors: Bui Xuan Toan, 裴春全
• Other Authors: Chi-Tai Wang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/p465f9

碩士 === 國立中央大學 === 工業管理研究所 === 105 === Abstract Scheduling is one of the most important problems in any manufacturing industry. Therefore, the problem has been studied extendedly. Since, the scheduling problem is classified as NP-hard problem, which means the time required for finding the optimal solution of the problem is grown exponentially with the size of the problem. Therefore, it is unrealistic to find optimal solution for the scheduling problem in the scene of the real world industrial case, even with today advanced computer system. There are many heuristic algorithms have been proposal to solve the scheduling problem. They are beam search, local search technique, tabular search and Genetic Algorithm (GA), to name a few. In recent years, GA has become a noticeable candidate for solving the scheduling problem effectively. The idea of mimicking the evolutionary process is very interesting to researchers. And the recent advanced in heuristic GA has sparked more attention toward new research and application in the field of GA. In Brewery industry, the fermentation process is the most crucial components of the whole manufacturing process. It will decide the quality, taste of the products as well as the productivity of the production line. Since, the fermentation time can take up to 41 days, and the requirement time is varying a lot between different types of beers, therefore finding a good scheduling solution to dealing with this complexity is crucial for beer manufacturers. This research will propose a GA to solve the scheduling problem in beer production. The proposed methodology will serve as a planning and analysis tool to utilize assets (tanks, filling lines) effectively, reduce congestion and synchronize the production process between the two production stages (liquid preparation and bottling). Keywords: scheduling, lot sizing, brewery industry, two-stage production, GA.