Title
A High Performing Memetic Algorithm for the Flowshop Scheduling Problem With Blocking
Abstract
This paper considers minimizing makespan for a blocking flowshop scheduling problem, which has important application in a variety of modern industries. A constructive heuristic is first presented to generate a good initial solution by combining the existing profile fitting (PF) approach and Nawaz-Enscore-Ham (NEH) heuristic in an effective way. Then, a memetic algorithm (MA) is proposed including effective techniques like a heuristic-based initialization, a path-relinking-based crossover operator, a referenced local search, and a procedure to control the diversity of the population. Afterwards, the parameters and operators of the proposed MA are calibrated by means of a design of experiments approach. Finally, a comparative evaluation is carried out with the best performing algorithms presented for the blocking flowshop with makespan criterion, and with the adaptations of other state-of-the-art MAs originally designed for the regular flowshop problem. The results show that the proposed MA performs much better than the other algorithms. Ultimately, 75 out of 120 upper bounds provided by Ribas [“An iterated greedy algorithm for the flowshop scheduling with blocking”, OMEGA, vol. 39, pp. 293-301, 2011.] for Taillard flowshop benchmarks that are considered as blocking flowshop instances are further improved by the presented MA.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1109/TASE.2012.2219860
IEEE T. Automation Science and Engineering
Keywords
Field
DocType
Job shop scheduling,Sociology,Statistics,Memetics,Educational institutions,Genetic algorithms,Biological cells
Memetic algorithm,Population,Mathematical optimization,Heuristic,Crossover,Job shop scheduling,Computer science,Flow shop scheduling,Greedy algorithm,Local search (optimization)
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
10
3
1545-5955
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
27
0.78
21
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Quan-Ke Pan1682.77
Ling Wang22745165.98
Hong-yan Sang316511.18
Junqing Li446242.69
Min Liu553633.56