Abstract: As a key link in tire production process, the scheduling plan of vulcanization process directly affects the efficiency of the whole tire production process. A discrete encoding method based on vulcanization order - tire number is proposed. An improved harmony search algorithm (IHS) is developed for scheduling the vulcanization workshop with the target of simultaneously minimizing the makespan, die-changing cost and machine idle rate. Vulcanization sequence and tire number are respectively discretized according to the harmony memory considering probability and pitch adjusting probability. The dynamic fine-tuning value is defined to fine-tune the processing number. Finally, the experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has higher convergence precision than the basic harmony search algorithm and particle swarm optimization algorithm.

Key words: harmony search algorithm, vulcanization workshop, multi-objective, dynamic fine-tuning, switch time, die-changing cost