Abstract
Recently, many studies are carried out with inspirations from ecological phenomena for developing optimization techniques. The new algorithm that is motivated by a common phenomenon in agriculture is colonization of invasive weeds. In this paper, a modified invasive weed optimization (IWO) algorithm is presented for optimization of multiobjective flexible job shop scheduling problems (FJSSPs) with the criteria to minimize the maximum completion time (makespan), the total workload of machines and the workload of the critical machine. IWO is a bio-inspired metaheuristic that mimics the ecological behaviour of weeds in colonizing and finding suitable place for growth and reproduction. IWO is developed to solve continuous optimization problems that’s why the heuristic rule the Smallest Position Value (SPV) is used to convert the continuous position values to the discrete job sequences. The computational experiments show that the proposed algorithm is highly competitive to the state-of-the-art methods in the literature since it is able to find the optimal and best-known solutions on the instances studied.
Highlights
Solving a NP-hard scheduling problem with only one objective is a difficult task
While in single objective optimization the optimal solution is usually clearly defined, this does not hold for multiobjective optimization problems
It was recognized that Invasive Weed Optimization (IWO) was well suited to multiobjective optimization
Summary
Solving a NP-hard scheduling problem with only one objective is a difficult task. Adding more objectives obviously makes this problem more difficult to solve. Instead of a single optimum, there is rather a set of good compromises solutions, generally known as Pareto optimal solutions from which the decision maker will select one. These solutions are optimal in the wider sense that no other solution in the search space is superior when all objectives are considered. Some of the distinctive properties of IWO in comparison with other numerical search algorithms are the way of reproduction, spatial dispersal, and competitive exclusion.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
