A differential evolution algorithm with two speed-up methods for NFSSP with SDSTs and RDs

Abstract

This paper presents a differential evolution algorithm with two speed-up methods (DEJTSM) for solving the no-wait flow-shop scheduling problem (NFSSP) with sequence-dependent setup times (SDSTs) and release dates (RDs). The criterion is to minimize the total completion time. To balance the exploration and exploitation abilities of our DE TSM, DE-based global search is utilized to find the promising regions or solutions over the solution space, and a fast local search according to two speed-up methods is designed to fast exploit the neighborhoods of these regions. Simulation results based on a set of random instances and comparisons with several effective meta-heuristics demonstrate the superiority of DE_FNES in terms of searching quality and efficiency.