Tabu Search Based Hybrid Meta-Heuristic Approaches for Schedule-Based Production Cost Minimization Problem for the Case of Cable Manufacturing Systems

This paper models and solves the scheduling problem of cable manufacturing industries that minimizes the total production cost, including processing, setup, and storing costs. Two hybrid meta-heuristics, which combine simulated annealing and variable neighbourhood search algorithms with tabu search algorithm, are proposed. Applying some case-based theorems and rules, a special initial solution with optimal setup cost is obtained for the algorithms. The computational experiments, including parameter tuning and final experiments over the benchmarks obtained from a real cable manufacturing factory, show superiority of the combination of tabu search and simulated annealing comparing to the other proposed hybrid and classical meta-heuristics.