Scheduling flow shops with blocking using a discrete self-organising migrating algorithm

Abstract

A novel approach of a discrete self-organising migrating algorithm is introduced to solve the flowshop with blocking scheduling problem. New sampling routines have been developed that propagate the space between solutions in order to drive the algorithm. The two benchmark problem sets of Carlier, Heller, Reeves and Taillard are solved using the new algorithm. The algorithm compares favourably with the published algorithms Differential Evolution, Tabu Search, Genetic Algorithms and their hybrid variants. A number of new upper bounds are obtained for the Taillard problem sets.

Keywords:

• flow shop scheduling
• heuristics
• operations research
• flowshop with blocking

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their constructive comments, which helped to improve the quality of this paper.