Effective social spider optimization algorithms for distributed assembly permutation flowshop scheduling problem in automobile manufacturing supply chain

This paper presents a novel distributed assembly permutation flowshop scheduling problem (DAPFSP) based on practical problems in automobile production. Different from the existing research on DAPFSP, this study considers that each component of the final product is composed of more than one part. Components are processed in a set of identical components manufacturing factories and are assembled into products in the assembly factory. The integration of manufacturing processes is an important objective of Industry 4.0. For solving this problem with the minimum makespan criterion, we introduce a three-level representation and a novel initialization method. To enhance the search ability of the proposed algorithms, we design three local search methods and two restart procedures according to characteristics of the problem. Then, by incorporating the problem specific knowledge with the social spider optimization algorithm (SSO), we propose three SSO variants: the SSO with hybrid local search strategies (HSSO), the HSSO with restart procedures (HSSOR), and the HSSOR with self-adaptive selection probability (HSSORP). Finally, 810 extended instances based on the famous instances are used to test the proposed algorithms. In most cases, HSSOR performs the best, with an average comparison metric value of 0.158% across three termination conditions, while the average comparison metric value for the best comparison method is 2.446%, which is 15.481 times that of HSSOR. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms can solve the problem efficiently.