Title: Multi-agent model based on combination of chemical reaction optimisation metaheuristic with Tabu search for flexible job shop scheduling problem

Authors: Bilel Marzouki; Olfa Belkahla Driss; Khaled Ghédira

Addresses: Ecole Nationale des Sciences de l'Informatique, SOIE-COSMOS Laboratory, Université de Manouba, Tunisia ' Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Tunis, SOIE-COSMOS Laboratory, Université de Manouba, Tunisia ' Institut Supérieur de Gestion de Tunis, SOIE-COSMOS Laboratory, Université de Manouba, Tunisia

Abstract: Scheduling in production systems consists in assigning operations on a set of available resources in order to achieve defined objectives. The flexible job shop scheduling problem (FJSP) is one of the scheduling problems and also an extension of classical job shop scheduling problem such that each operation can be processed on different machine and its processing time depends on the used machine. This paper proposes a multi-agent model based on combination of chemical reaction optimisation metaheuristic with Tabu search to solve the FJSP in order to minimise the maximum completion time (makespan). To evaluate the performance of our model, experiments are performed on well known benchmark instances proposed in the literature and comparisons are made with other approaches in literature.

Keywords: manufacturing; production system; industrial engineering; scheduling; optimisation; flexible job shop problem; artificial intelligence; multi-agent system; chemical reaction optimisation metaheuristic; Tabu search; decision making; metaheuristic; hybridisation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIEI.2018.091875

International Journal of Intelligent Engineering Informatics, 2018 Vol.6 No.3/4, pp.242 - 265

Received: 14 Mar 2017
Accepted: 04 Jun 2017
Published online: 20 May 2018 *

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