Article ID: | iaor20062065 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 101 |
Issue: | 2 |
Start Page Number: | 259 |
End Page Number: | 272 |
Publication Date: | Jan 2006 |
Journal: | International Journal of Production Economics |
Authors: | Rajendran C., Gajpal Y. |
Keywords: | ant system, flowshop |
The problem of scheduling in permutation flowshops with the objective of minimizing the completion-time variance of jobs is considered and solved by making use of ant-colony optimization (ACO) algorithms. ACO is an algorithmic approach, inspired by the foraging behavior of real ants, which can be applied to solve combinatorial optimization problems. A new ant-colony algorithm has been developed in this paper to solve the flowshop scheduling problem. The objective is to minimize the completion-time variance of jobs. Two existing ant-colony algorithms and the proposed ant-colony algorithm have been compared with an existing heuristic for scheduling with the objective of minimizing the completion-time variance of jobs. It is found that the proposed ant-colony algorithm gives promising and better results, on an average, as compared to those solutions given by the existing ant-colony algorithms and the existing heuristic for the permutation flowshop scheduling problem under study.