An Imperialist Competitive Algorithm With the Diversified Operators for Many-Objective Scheduling in Flexible Job Shop

A number of related works have been done on multi-objective flexible job shop scheduling problem, however, many-objective flexible job shop scheduling problems (MaOFJSP) with at least four objectives are seldom considered. In this paper, an imperialist competitive algorithm with the diversified operators (DOICA) is proposed for MaOFJSP with the minimization of makespan, total tardiness, total workload, and total energy consumption. In DOICA, the diversified assimilation and revolution are used according to the features of empires, a novel imperialist competition is implemented by excluding the strongest empire and doing multiple neighborhood search of a solution in the strongest empire. The extensive experiments are conducted by using a number of benchmark instances to test the impact of strategies of DOICA on its performance and compare DOICA with other algorithms from literature finally. The computational results validate that the new strategies of DOICA are effective and DOICA can provide promising results for the considered MaOFJSP.