Constructing Ensembles of Dispatching Rules for Multi-objective Problems

Resumen

Scheduling represents an important aspect of many real-world processes, which is why such problems have been well studied in the literature. Such problems are often dynamic and require that multiple criteria be optimised simultaneously. Dispatching rules (DRs) are the method of choice for solving dynamic problems. However, existing DRs are usually implemented for the optimisation of only a single criterion. Since manual design of DRs is difficult, genetic programming (GP) has been used to automatically design new DRs for single and multiple objectives. However, the performance of a single rule is limited, and it may not work well in all situations. Therefore, ensembles have been used to create rule sets that outperform single DRs. The goal of this study is to adapt ensemble learning methods to create ensembles that optimise multiple criteria simultaneously. The method creates ensembles of DRs with multiple objectives previously evolved by GP to improve their performance. The results show that ensembles are suitable for the considered multi-objective problem.