New particle swarm algorithm for job shop scheduling problems

A new particle swarm algorithm is proposed to make up for the drawback of conventional one on solving job shop scheduling problem, and improve the performance of searching solutions. In the new algorithm, the particle swarm algorithm is adopted to search in the solution space globally. According to the feature of job shop problem solutions, a critical operation-based selection method is proposed, and the TS algorithm based on it is adopted as the local algorithm to strengthen the capability of local search. The new particle swarm algorithm has been tested with 13 hard benchmark problems. The result demonstrates that the obtained best solution and the average value of ten times result are better than parallel genetic algorithm and taboo search algorithm. So the validity of the proposed new particle swarm algorithm is validated.