Ant systems Local Search Optimization for flexible Job Shop Schedul Production.pdfVIP

International Journal of Computers, Communications Control Vol. II (2007), No. 2, pp. 174-184 Ant systems Local Search Optimization for flexible Job Shop Scheduling Production Noureddine Liouane, Ihsen Saad, Slim Hammadi, Pierre Borne Abstract: The problem of efficiently scheduling production jobs on several ma- chines is an important consideration when attempting to make effective use of a multi- machines system such as a flexible job shop scheduling production system (FJSP). In most of its practical formulations, the FJSP is known to be NP-hard [8][9], so exact solution methods are unfeasible for most problem instances and heuristic approaches must therefore be employed to find good solutions with reasonable search time. In this paper, two closely related approaches to the resolution of the flexible job shop scheduling production system are described. These approaches combine the Ant system optimisation meta-heuristic (AS) with local search methods, including tabu search. The efficiency of the developed method is compared with others. Keywords: Flexible production, Ant colony, Tabu search, job shop scheduling, makespan, optimisa- tion. 1 Introduction Modern hybrid heuristics are by their nature non-exhaustive, and so there is often scope for different approaches to better previous solution methods according to the execution speed or the quality of feasible solutions. Traditional approaches to resolve the FJSP are as varied as the different formulations of the problem, but include fast, simple heuristics [2][12], tabu search [15], evolutionary approaches [5] and modern hybrid meta-heuristics that consolidate the advantages of various different approaches [1][13]. The ant colony optimisation (ACO) was described by