Title: A hybrid discrete firefly algorithm to solve flow shop scheduling problems to minimise total flow time

Authors: M.K. Marichelvam; M. Geetha

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Kamaraj College of Engineering and Technology, Virudhunagar 626001, Tamilnadu, India ' Department of Mathematics, Kamaraj College of Engineering and Technology, Virudhunagar, Tamilnadu, 626 001, India

Abstract: In this paper, we consider m-machine flow shop scheduling problems (FSSPs). The objective is to schedule the available n jobs to minimise the total flow time. The flow shop scheduling problems have been proved to be strongly non-deterministic polynomial-time hard (NP-hard). Hence, exact methods cannot be used to solve even small size problems. Researchers addressed many heuristics and meta-heuristics to solve the problems. Firefly algorithm (FA) is one of the recently developed meta-heuristic algorithms. We propose a hybrid discrete firefly algorithm (HDFA) to solve the FSSPs to minimise the total flow time. To validate the performances of the HDFA, computational experiments are conducted on a number of randomly generated test problems with different parameters and the results proved the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Keywords: flow shop scheduling; total flow time; heuristics; metaheuristics; hybrid discrete firefly algorithm; HDFA.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIC.2016.079572

International Journal of Bio-Inspired Computation, 2016 Vol.8 No.5, pp.318 - 325

Received: 19 Sep 2013
Accepted: 05 May 2014
Published online: 04 Oct 2016 *

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