In the current global cooperative production mode, the distributed fuzzy flow-shop scheduling problem (DFFSP) has attracted much attention because it takes the uncertain factors in the actual flow-shop scheduling problem into account. This paper investigates a multi-stage hybrid evolutionary algorithm with sequence difference-based differential evolution (MSHEA-SDDE) for the minimization of fuzzy completion time and fuzzy total flow time. MSHEA-SDDE balances the convergence and distribution performance of the algorithm at different stages. In the first stage, the hybrid sampling strategy makes the population rapidly converge toward the Pareto front (PF) in multiple directions. In the second stage, the sequence difference-based differential evolution (SDDE) is used to speed up the convergence speed to improve the convergence performance. In the last stage, the evolutional direction of SDDE is changed to guide individuals to search the local area of the PF, thereby further improving the convergence and distribution performance. The results of experiments show that the performance of MSHEA-SDDE is superior to the classical comparison algorithms in terms of solving the DFFSP.
Keywords: distributed fuzzy flow-shop scheduling; hybrid evolutionary algorithms; multi-stage strategies; multiobjective optimization; sequence difference.