A backtracking search hyper-heuristic for the distributed assembly flow-shop scheduling problem

Distributed assembly permutation flow-shop scheduling problem (DAPFSP) is recognized as an important class of problems in modern supply chains and manufacturing systems. In this paper, a backtracking search hyper-heuristic (BS-HH) algorithm is proposed to solve the DAPFSP. In the BS-HH scheme, ten simple and effective heuristic rules are designed to construct a set of low-level heuristics (LLHs), and the backtracking search algorithm is employed as the high-level strategy to manipulate the LLHs to operate on the solution space. Additionally, an efficient solution encoding and decoding scheme is proposed to generate a feasible schedule. The effectiveness of the BS-HH is evaluated on two typical benchmark sets and the computational results indicate the superiority of the proposed BS-HH scheme over the state-of-the-art algorithms.