Hybrid flowshop scheduling with sequence-dependent setup times by hybridizing max-min ant system, simulated annealing and variable neighbourhood search

Abstract

This paper deals with the hybrid flowshop scheduling problems with sequence-dependent setup times. To minimize the makespan, we propose hybrid metaheuristic approach, which integrates several features from ant colony optimization, simulated annealing and variable neighbourhood search in a new configurable scheduling algorithm. Our proposed algorithms are tuned by means of design of experiments approach. We present computational experiments on standard test problems and compare the results with the several algorithms presented previously. The results illustrate that the hybrid metaheuristic outperforms the other algorithms.