Solving the job shop scheduling problem using the imperialist competitive algorithm

This paper deals with the Job Shop Scheduling Problem with the minimization of makespan as the objective. A novel meta-heuristic named imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) is adopted to solve the problem. Since appropriate design of the parameters has a significant impact on the performance of the algorithm, the parameters were chosen based on orthogonal test. A local search strategy based on critical path and critical block was used to improve the performance of the algorithm. At last the algorithm was tested on a set of standard benchmark instances, and the computational results showed that the algorithm proposed performed well in both convergence rate and better global optima achievement.