A hybrid approach for minimizing makespan in permutation flowshop scheduling

Abstract

This work proposes a hybrid approach for solving traditional flowshop scheduling problems to reduce the makespan (total completion time). To solve scheduling problems, a combination of Decision Tree (DT) and Scatter Search (SS) algorithms are used. Initially, the DT is used to generate a seed solution which is then given input to the SS to obtain optimal / near optimal solutions of makespan. The DT used the entropy function to convert the given problem into a tree structured format / set of rules. The SS provides an extensive investigation of the search space through diversification. The advantages of both DT and SS are used to form a hybrid approach. The proposed algorithm is tested with various benchmark datasets available for flowshop scheduling. The statistical results prove that the proposed method is competent and efficient for solving flowshop problems.