An integrated ant colony optimization algorithm for the hybrid flow shop scheduling problem

This study addresses the multistage hybrid flow shop scheduling problem. The objective of scheduling is to assign each operation to a machine out of the set of eligible machines and to determine the processing operation sequences on the machines so that the makespan is minimized. Hence to solve this NP-hard problem, an integrated ant colony optimization algorithm is proposed. To evaluate the performance of our algorithm, benchmark problems adopted from the literature are used. It is found after extensive computational investigation that the proposed ant colony algorithm gives promising and good results.