An Effective Immune Based Approach for the No-Wait Flow Shop Scheduling Problems with Multiple Machines

Abstract

For scheduling problems, no-wait constraint is an important requirement for many industries. As known, the no-wait scheduling problem is NP-hard and has several practical applications. This paper applies an immune algorithm to solve the multiple-machine no-wait flow shop scheduling problem with minimizing the makespan. Twenty-three benchmark problems on the OR-Library are solved by the immune algorithm. Limited numerical results show that the immune algorithm performs better than the other typical approaches in the literature for most of instances.