Three-Stage Tabu Search for Solving Large-Scale Flow Shop Scheduling Problems.

Abstract

Tabu search is a meta-heuristic approach designed skillfully for finding a suboptimal solution of combinatorial optimization problems. In this paper the tabu search with three stages is proposed for solving large-scale flow shop scheduling problems. In order to obtain a better suboptimal solution in a short computation time, three different candidate lists are used to determine the incumbent solution in the respective search stages. The candidate lists are constructed by restricting the moving of each job. Test problems with four kinds of job data are examined. Based on analyzing the relationship between the candidate list and the suboptimal solution for each job data, a common parameter is given to construct the candidate list during the search process. Comparison of the computation result is made with the genetic algorithm and the basic tabu search, from which it is shown that the proposed tabu search outperforms two others.