A hybrid ant colony optimisation algorithm for job shop problems and its convergence analysis

Abstract

This paper presents a hybrid ant colony optimisation (HACO) algorithm for solving job shop problems. The criterion considered is the maximum completion time, the so-called makespan. The HACO algorithm improves the performance of intelligence optimisation algorithm, which adopts ant colony optimisation (ACO) algorithm to search in the global solution space, and tabu search (TS) algorithm is utilised as the local algorithm in each generation. The global asymptotic convergence of the hybrid algorithm is proved by Markov chain theory in the paper. By testing 13 hard benchmarks instance, the results demonstrate that the HACO algorithm is effective.