Due-date assignment plays an important role in scheduling systems and strongly influences the delivery performance of job shops. Because of the stochastic and dynamic nature of job shops, the development of general due-date assignment models (DDAMs) is complicated. In this study, two genetic programming (GP) methods are proposed to evolve DDAMs for job shop environments. The experimental results show that the evolved DDAMs can make more accurate estimates than other existing dynamic DDAMs with promising reusability. In addition, the evolved operation-based DDAMs show better performance than the evolved DDAMs employing aggregate information of jobs and machines.

Many real-world optimization problems are subjected to uncertainties that may be characterized by the presence of noise in the objective functions. The estimation of distribution algorithm (EDA), which models the global distribution of the population for searching tasks, is one of the evolutionary computation techniques that deals with noisy information. This paper studies the potential of EDAs; particularly an EDA based on restricted Boltzmann machines that handles multi-objective optimization problems in a noisy environment. Noise is introduced to the objective functions in the form of a Gaussian distribution. In order to reduce the detrimental effect of noise, a likelihood correction feature is proposed to tune the marginal probability distribution of each decision variable. The EDA is subsequently hybridized with a particle swarm optimization algorithm in a discrete domain to improve its search ability. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is examined via eight benchmark instances with different characteristics and shapes of the Pareto optimal front. The scalability, hybridization, and computational time are rigorously studied. Comparative studies show that the proposed approach outperforms other state of the art algorithms.