Combination of Ant Algorithms and Simulated Annealing in solving Flow Shop Scheduling Problem

Abstract

In this article, a common production scheduling task is presented and solved. This problem is the Flow Shop Scheduling. During the problem, given n jobs and m machines. All jobs must be processed in the same machine order. A job can only be started on a given machine if the processing on the previous machine has already been completed and the machine is free. The objective function of the problem is the minimization of the makespan. In this paper, two Hybrid Ant Algorithms were applied to the problem and solved the Taillard benchmark dataset. These two algorithms are the Hybrid Ant Colony System with Simulated Annealing and the Hybrid Rank Based Version of Ant System with Simulated Annealing.