Production scheduling in flexible job shop scheduling using an Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) minimizing makespan

The Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem (FJSP), is an important extension of the classic Job Shop Scheduling problem. In contrast to this, in the FJSP the same operation can be processed on more than one machine. This problem is considered of high computational complexity, requiring large combinatorial search space. In this sense, it is complex to achieve an optimal solution to traditional optimization approaches. In recent decades, they have proposed various approaches for solving this problem. In this adaptation work, Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) is proposed for solving the problem FJSP, minimizing the makespan. The computational results show that the proposed algorithm is effective and efficient for solving the problem.