Research on flexible job shop scheduling under finite transportation conditions for digital twin workshop

Abstract Flexible job shop scheduling is one of the most effective methods for solving multiple varieties and small batch production problems in discrete manufacturing enterprises. However, limitations of actual transportation conditions in the flexible job shop scheduling problem (FJSP) are neglected, which limits its application in actual production. In this paper, the constraint influence imposed by finite transportation conditions in the FJSP is addressed. The coupling relationship between transportation and processing stages is analyzed, and a finite transportation conditions model is established. Then, a three-layer encoding with redundancy and decoding with correction is designed to improve the genetic algorithm and solve the FJSP model. Furthermore, an entity-JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) method is proposed for transmission between scheduling services and Digital Twin (DT) virtual equipment to apply the scheduling results to the DT system. The results confirm that the proposed finite transportation conditions have a significant impact on scheduling under different scales of scheduling problems and transportation times.