Hybrid ant colony optimization technique for the sequence dependent flowshop scheduling problem

In many real-world production systems, optimal job scheduling requires an explicit cosideration of sequence- dependent setup times. One of the most important scheduling criteria in practical systems is makespan. Many heuristics and meta-heuristics have been successfully applied to this kind of problem before and the objective of this paper is to propose one meta-heuristic to overcome previous methods is solving this problem. in this paper, we present a hybrid ant colony optimization (HACO) algorithm for the sequence dependent permutation flowshop scheduling problem. the proposed HACO algorithm benefits of a new approach for computing the initial pheromone values and some local search structures. the proposed algorithm is experimented on the randomly problem istances and results indicate that it is very competitive the with the axisting best metaheuristics.

Keywords:

Hybrid ant colony optimization , Scheduling , Permutation flowshop , sequence dependent , makspan