A hybrid heuristic algorithm for the no-wait flowshop scheduling problem

The no-wait flowshop scheduling problem (NWFSP) that needs jobs to be processed without interruption between consecutive machines is a NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem, and embodies a significant area in production scheduling. The objective is set to find the scheduling which minimizes the makespan. In this paper, a new hybrid ant colony optimization (ACO) and Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm is presented to solve NWFSP. The computational results on 29 benchmark instances provided by Carlier and Reeves and comparison with other reported results in the literature approves the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.