An Enhanced Fruit Fly Optimization for the Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem with Lot Streaming

In this work, we propose an enhanced fruit fly optimization (EnFFO) to solve the flexible job shop scheduling problem with the consideration of lot streaming, the criterion of which is total flowtime minimization. In EnFFO, the multi-swarm scheme is utilized to balance the exploitation and exploration ability. To better match the two sub-problems in FJSP, we introduce new solution representation and decoding scheme. In addition, considering characteristics of multi-swarm FFO and FJSP, adaptive search scheme and information interaction tactics are presented to strengthen search performance of the algorithm. Finally, comparisons with recent algorithms verify the superiority of the proposed EnFFO for the considered problem.