Abstract: To balance the performance and energy consumption of the mixed-model assembly lines effectively, a multi-objective energy-saving scheduling method for the tow-train is proposed. The energy-saving objective is introduced into the traditional material handling scheduling model for the tow-train and a multi-objective mixed integer programming model is constructed with two objective functions of minimizing the maximum line-side inventory and the total energy consumption. A forwards multi-objective dynamic programming based on the time window and dominance rules is presented to obtain the Pareto solutions: the definition for new states is given to obtain the Markov property, the time window and dominance rules are introduced through reducing the searching of non-dominated solution to improve the computational efficiency, running time can be reduced by 8.10%. The outperformance of the proposed method and the feasibility of the algorithm are verified by the simulation results.

Key words: tow-train, dynamic programming, material handling scheduling, multiple objective, energy