Since the increasing demand for surgeries in hospitals, the surgery scheduling problems have attracted extensive attention. This study focuses on solving a surgery scheduling problem with setup time. First, a mathematical model is created to minimize the maximum completion time (makespan) of all surgeries and patient waiting time, simultaneously. The time by the fatigue effect is included in the surgery time, which is caused by doctors’ long working time. Second, four mate-heuristics are optimized to address the relevant problems. Three novel strategies are designed to improve the quality of the initial solutions. To improve the convergence of the algorithms, seven local search operators are proposed based on the characteristics of the surgery scheduling problems. Third, Q-learning is used to dynamically choose the optimal local search operator for the current state in each iteration. Finally, by comparing the experimental results of 30 instances, the Q-learning based local search strategy’s effectiveness is verified. Among all the compared algorithms, the improved artificial bee colony (ABC) with Q-learning based local search has the best competitiveness.

Remanufacturing is regarded as a sustainable manufacturing paradigm of energy conservation and environment protection. To improve the efficiency of the remanufacturing process, this work investigates an integrated scheduling problem for disassembly and reprocessing in a remanufacturing process, where product structures and uncertainty are taken into account. First, a stochastic programming model is developed to minimize the maximum completion time (makespan). Second, a Q-learning based hybrid meta-heuristic (Q-HMH) is specially devised. In each iteration, a Q-learning method is employed to adaptively choose a premium algorithm from four candidate ones, including genetic algorithm (GA), artificial bee colony (ABC), shuffled frog-leaping algorithm (SFLA), and simulated annealing (SA) methods. At last, simulation experiments are carried out by using sixteen instances with different scales, and three state-of-the-art algorithms in literature and an exact solver CPLEX are chosen for comparisons. By analyzing the results with the average relative percentage deviation (RPD) metric, we find that Q-HMH outperforms its rivals by 9.79%−26.76%. The results and comparisons verify the excellent competitiveness of Q-HMH for solving the concerned problems.

The hybrid flow shop group scheduling problem (HFGSP) with the delivery time windows has been widely studied owing to its better flexibility and suitability for the current just-in-time production mode. However, there are several unresolved challenges in problem modeling and algorithmic design tailored for HFGSP. In our study, we place emphasis on the constraint of timeliness. Therefore, this paper first constructs a mixed integer linear programming model of HFGSP with sequence-dependent setup time and delivery time windows to minimize the total weighted earliness and tardiness (TWET). Then a penalty groups-assisted iterated greedy integrating idle time insertion ( $\mathrm{P}\mathrm{G}\mathrm{\_}\mathrm{I}\mathrm{G}\mathrm{\_}\mathrm{I}\mathrm{T}\mathrm{I}$) is proposed to solve the above problem. In the $\mathrm{P}\mathrm{G}\mathrm{\_}\mathrm{I}\mathrm{G}\mathrm{\_}\mathrm{I}\mathrm{T}\mathrm{I}$, a double decoding strategy is proposed based on the earliest available machine rule and the idle time insertion rule to calculate the TWET value. Subsequently, to reduce the amount of computation, a skip-based destruction and reconstruction strategy is designed, and a penalty groups-assisted local search is proposed to further improve the quality of the solution by disturbing the penalized groups, i.e., early and tardy groups. Finally, through comprehensive statistical experiments on 270 test instances, the results prove that the proposed algorithm is effective compared to four state-of-the-art algorithms.

At present, home health care (HHC) has been accepted as an effective method for handling the healthcare problems of the elderly. The HHC scheduling and routing problem (HHCSRP) attracts wide concentration from academia and industrial communities. This work proposes an HHCSRP considering several care centers, where a group of customers (i.e., patients and the elderly) require being assigned to care centers. Then, various kinds of services are provided by caregivers for customers in different regions. By considering the skill matching, customers’ appointment time, and caregivers’ workload balancing, this article formulates an optimization model with multiple objectives to achieve minimal service cost and minimal delay cost. To handle it, we then introduce a brain storm optimization method with particular multi-objective search mechanisms (MOBSO) via combining with the features of the investigated HHCSRP. Moreover, we perform experiments to test the effectiveness of the designed method. Via comparing the MOBSO with two excellent optimizers, the results confirm that the developed method has significant superiority in addressing the considered HHCSRP.