Solving No-Wait Flow Shop Scheduling Problems by a Hybrid Quantum-Inspired Evolutionary Algorithm

This paper is the first to consider the hybrid quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm (HQEA) on the no-wait permutation flow shop scheduling problem (PFSP) for minimizing the makespan. In this HQEA, the quantum chromosomes are encoded by using the quantum rotating angle and a simple but efficient converting mechanism for determining job sequence is proposed for the representation of solution firstly. Then, we adopt differential operation to perform the updating of quantum gate and the local search to perform exploitation in the promising permutation-based solutions. We make the simulations on famous benchmarks and the comparisons with other state-of-the-art approaches demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed HQEA for no-wait flow shop scheduling problem.