Title: Minimisation of total tardiness in hybrid flowshop scheduling problems with sequence dependent setup times using a discrete firefly algorithm

Authors: M.K. Marichelvam; A. Azhagurajan; M. Geetha

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Mepco Schlenk Engineering College, Sivakasi 626005, Tamilnadu, India ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Mepco Schlenk Engineering College, Sivakasi 626005, Tamilnadu, India ' Department of Mathematics, Kamaraj College of Engineering and Technology, Virudhunagar, Tamilnadu, 626 001, India

Abstract: In this paper, hybrid flowshop (HFS) scheduling problems with sequence dependent setup times (SDST) are considered. The objective is to minimise the total tardiness. As these problems were proved to be strongly NP-hard (non-deterministic polynomial time hard) type combinatorial optimisation problems, exact methods cannot be used to solve the problems. Hence, many heuristics and meta-heuristics were addressed in the literature to solve the problems. In this paper, discrete version of a recently developed bio-inspired meta-heuristic algorithm called as discrete firefly algorithm (DFA) is proposed to solve the problems. Extensive computational experiments are carried out to validate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Computational results reveal the success of the proposed algorithm.

Keywords: hybrid flowshop; scheduling; total tardiness; set up time; discrete firefly algorithm; DFA.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2018.091204

International Journal of Operational Research, 2018 Vol.32 No.1, pp.114 - 126

Received: 28 Feb 2015
Accepted: 07 Jul 2015
Published online: 16 Apr 2018 *

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