A performance comparison of alternative heuristics for the Flow Shop Scheduling problem

Determining an optimal schedule to minimise the completion time of the last job abandoning the system (makespan) become a very difficult problem when there are more than two machines in the flow shop. Due, both to its economical impact and complexity, attention to solve this problem has been paid by many researchers. Starting with the Johnson's exact algorithm for the two-machine makespan problem [1], over the past three decades extensive search have been done on pure m-machine flow shop problems. Many researchers faced the Flow Shop Scheduling (FSSP) by means of well-known heuristics which, are successfully used for certain instances of the problem and providing a single acceptable solution. Current trends to solve the FSSP involve Evolutionary Computation and Ant Colony paradigms.. This work shows different bio-inspired heuristics for the FSSP, including hybrid versions of enhanced multirecombined evolutionary algorithms and ant colony algorithms [2], on a set of flow shop scheduling instances. A discussion on implementation details, analysis and a comparison of different approaches to the problem is shown.