Optimization of continuous-time production planning using hybrid genetic algorithms-simulated annealing

Evolutionary algorithms are stochastic search methods that mimic the principles of natural biological evolution to produce better and better approximations to a solution and have been used widely for optimization problems. A general problem of continuous-time aggregate production planning for a given total number of changes in production rate over the total planning horizon is considered. It is very important to identify and solve the problem of continuous-time production planning horizon with varying production rates over the interval of the planning period horizon. Some of the researchers have proposed global search methods for the continuous-time aggregate production-planning problem. So far, less work is reported to solve the problem of continuous-time production planning using local search methods like genetic algorithms (GA) and simulated annealing (SA). So in this work, we propose a modified single objective evolutionary program approach, namely GA, SA, and hybrid genetic algorithms-simulated annealing (GA-SA) for continuous-time production plan problems. The results are compared with each other and it was found that the hybrid algorithm performs better. © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2004.