Ant colony optimization algorithm for a Bi-criteria 2-stage hybrid flowshop scheduling problem

Abstract

We consider the problem of scheduling jobs in a hybrid flowshop with two stages. Our objective is to minimize both the makespan and the total completion time of jobs. This problem has been little studied in the literature. To solve the problem, we propose an ant colony optimization procedure. Computational experiments are conducted using random-generated instances from the literature. In comparison against other well-known heuristics from the literature, experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms such heuristics.