Studying job shop scheduling problem has become increasingly important with the development of CIMS.Identical parallel machine scheduling problem of minimizing the number of tardy jobs is a kind of important job shop scheduling problem

but there have been many difficulties in the course of solving large scale identical parallel machine scheduling problem with too many jobs and machines so far.Evolutionary programming method is an important evolutionary computation method as genetic algorithm

and its many advantages such as simple description

flexible usage

efficient running

good robustness

and less restriction from initial conditions

make it have great practical value.But compared with genetic algorithm

the application of evolutionary programming has just begun

and papers about the application of evolutionary programming in the field of production scheduling in particular are much fewer

so it is very worth while to develop further application fields of evolutionary programming method.In this paper

evolutionary programming method is applied to identical paallel machine scheduling problem of minimizing the number of tardy jobs for the first time.Researches are made in these aspects such as problem formulation

expression of feasible solution

mutation method of evolutionary programming and so on.Computational results of different scale problems justify the efficacy of the evolutionary programming algorithm

and that it is fit for solving larger scale identical parallel machine scheduling problem

and that the quality of its solution is superior to heuristic procedure.