Title: Meta-heuristic approaches for flowshop scheduling problems: a review

Authors: Deepanshu Arora; Gopal Agarwal

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur, India ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur, India

Abstract: The right approach towards the optimisation of multi-objective nonlinear problem is the incremental adoption of available techniques and strategies that help to minimise the solution time and to improve the optimised results. Meta-heuristics are heuristic methods that help the search through the solution space using algorithms. Meta-heuristics further improve the solution that comes initially from heuristics. This paper presents various types of meta-heuristics approaches for optimising flowshop scheduling (FSS) with focus on minimising parameters like total tardiness, total earliness, maximum makespan, total no. of tardy jobs, etc. Since the problem is NP-hard, the meta-heuristics and hybrid meta-heuristics are most appropriate methods to solve this kind of problem. Meta-heuristics are projected as strategic means to achieve the optimum and efficient schedule, with positive impact on cost minimisation (economies of scale) and simultaneously reducing solution time.

Keywords: metaheuristics; genetic algorithms; particle swarm optimisation; PSO; simulated annealing; ant colony optimisation; ACO; artificial neural networks; ANNs; tabu search; flowshop scheduling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAOM.2016.076203

International Journal of Advanced Operations Management, 2016 Vol.8 No.1, pp.1 - 16

Received: 27 Apr 2015
Accepted: 30 Oct 2015
Published online: 29 Apr 2016 *

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