A Hyperheuristic With Q-Learning for the Multiobjective Energy-Efficient Distributed Blocking Flow Shop Scheduling Problem

Carbon peaking and carbon neutrality, which are the significant national strategy for sustainable development, have attracted considerable attention from production enterprises. In this study, the energy consumption is considered in the distributed blocking flow shop scheduling problem (DBFSP). A hyperheuristic with Q-learning (HHQL) is presented to address the energy-efficient DBFSP (EEDBFSP). Q-learning is employed to select an appropriate low-level heuristic (LLH) from a predesigned LLH set according to historical information fed back by LLH. An initialization method, which considers both total tardiness (TTD) and total energy consumption (TEC), is proposed to construct the initial population. The e-greedy strategy is introduced to utilize the learned knowledge while retaining a certain degree of exploration in the process of selecting LLH. The acceleration operation of the job on the critical path is designed to optimize TTD. The deceleration operation of the job on the noncritical path is designed to optimize TEC. The statistical and computational experimentation in an extensive benchmark testified that the HHQL outperforms the other comparison algorithm regarding efficiency and significance in solving EEDBFSP.