A discrete artificial bee colony algorithm for the total flowtime minimization in permutation flow shops

Obtaining an optimal solution for a permutation flowshop scheduling problem with the total flowtime criterion in a reasonable computational timeframe using traditional approaches and optimization tools has been a challenge. This paper presents a discrete artificial bee colony algorithm hybridized with a variant of iterated greedy algorithms to find the permutation that gives the smallest total flowtime. Iterated greedy algorithms are comprised of local search procedures based on insertion and swap neighborhood structures. In the same context, we also consider a discrete differential evolution algorithm from our previous work. The performance of the proposed algorithms is tested on the well-known benchmark suite of Taillard. The highly effective performance of the discrete artificial bee colony and hybrid differential evolution algorithms is compared against the best performing algorithms from the existing literature in terms of both solution quality and CPU times. Ultimately, 44 out of the 90 best known solutions provided very recently by the best performing estimation of distribution and genetic local search algorithms are further improved by the proposed algorithms with short-term searches. The solutions known to be the best to date are reported for the benchmark suite of Taillard with long-term searches, as well. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.