Determining optimal combination of genetic operators for flow shop scheduling

Genetic algorithms (GAs) have gained wide research and applications in production scheduling fields, but the efficiency and effectiveness of a GA significantly depend on its parameters and operators. In contrast to the rich research on determination of optimal and adaptive parameters, little research has been done on determining optimal combination of genetic operators. Different from the traditional way by trial and error, this paper presents a novel and systematical approach based on ordinal optimisation (OO) and optimal computing budget allocation (OCBA) technique to determine optimal combination of genetic operators for flow shop scheduling problems. Simulation results show that the proposed methodology is able to determine optimal combination of genetic operators and simultaneously to provide a good solution with reasonable performance evaluation for scheduling problem.