A new approach for solving the flow‐shop scheduling problem using a parallel optimization algorithm

Abstract

In any organization and business, efficient scheduling cause increased efficiency, reducing the time required to complete jobs and increasing an organization’s profitability in a competitive environment. Also, the flow-shop scheduling problem is a vital type of scheduling problem with many real-world applications. Flow-shop scheduling has numerous exciting applications in various manufacturing and industrial domains. During the past eras, the growing interests in the arrangement of flow shops with diverse objective functions (for example, minimizing the makespan and flow-time) were observed. The permutation flow-shop is formulated as mixed-integer programming, and it is an NP-Hard problem. Therefore, in this paper, a novel method is provided to decrease the makespan and completion time. Since parallel algorithms use some computing elements to accelerate the search and present a new exploration pattern that is frequently suitable to enhance the quality of the results, in this research, a parallel ant colony optimization algorithm is employed to solve the mentioned problem. The Matlab simulation setting in Net Beans IDE 8.0.2 and Java to simulate the introduced method is applied. According to the obtained results, the suggested procedure has more efficiency than the previous methods. The Matlab simulator outcomes have indicated that the average response time has been improved compared to the PSO-SA and HBC algorithms. Also, the makespan is improved in comparison to GA and MOACSA.