Grey Wolf production scheduling for the capital goods industry

The capital goods industry produces physical assets used for current and future production. Capital goods are highly customised. Production scheduling aims to synchronise material supply, component manufacturing, sub-assembly and final assembly processes to minimise the total costs of earliness and tardiness, whilst satisfying finite capacity, machining and assembly precedence constraints. This paper presents the first application of Grey Wolf Optimisation (GWO) together with modified and hybridised versions for solving the capital goods scheduling problem. A novel GWO-based production scheduling tool was developed and validated using four realistic case studies obtained from a collaborating company. The first experiment identified appropriate parameter settings for the GWO. The performance of the GWO was then evaluated and compared with a modified GWO and a hybridised GWO. The computational results obtained from the proposed methods were statistical analysed. The outperformed other metaheuristics. •First application on modified and hybrid GWO for solving complex capital goods scheduling problem.•Literature related to capital goods production scheduling problem was comprehensively reviewed.•Novel GWO-based capital goods production scheduling programme was explained step-by-step.•Four realistic case studies obtained from a collaborating capital goods company were studied.•Performance of GWO, modified GWO, hybrid GWO and other metaheuristics were evaluated.