Title: Solving flexible job shop scheduling problems using a hybrid lion optimisation algorithm

Authors: M.K. Marichelvam; P. Manimaran; M. Geetha

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Mepco Schlenk Engineering College, Sivakasi, Tamilnadu, 626005, India ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Kamaraj College of Engineering and Technology, Virudhunagar, Tamilnadu, 626001, India ' Department of Mathematics, Kamaraj College of Engineering and Technology, Virudhunagar, Tamilnadu, 626001, India

Abstract: This paper addresses the flexible job shop scheduling problem (FJSP) with makespan criterion. The FJSP has been proved to be strongly NP-hard. The FJSP is a generalisation and extension of the classical job shop scheduling problem (JSP). As the problem is NP-hard, exact solution techniques cannot be used to tackle the problem. Researchers have proposed several heuristics and meta-heuristics to solve the problem. The lion optimisation algorithm is one of the recently developed meta-heuristic algorithms. A hybrid lion optimisation algorithm (HLOA) is proposed in the present work to solve the FJSP. A heuristic is hybridised with the LOA to improve the solution quality. To the best of our knowledge this is the first reported application of the LOA to solve the scheduling problems. The performance of the proposed algorithm is tested with two different sets of benchmark problems addressed in the literature. Computational results substantiate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Keywords: scheduling; flexible job shop; NP-hard; makespan; lion optimisation algorithm.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAOM.2018.093257

International Journal of Advanced Operations Management, 2018 Vol.10 No.2, pp.91 - 108

Received: 08 Sep 2017
Accepted: 05 Dec 2017
Published online: 24 Jul 2018 *

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