Solving the distributed two machine flow-shop scheduling problem using differential evolution

Abstract

Flow-shop scheduling covers a class of widely studied optimisation problem which focus on optimally sequencing a set of jobs to be processed on a set of machines according to a given set of constraints. Recently, greater research attention has been given to distributed variants of this problem. Here we concentrate on the distributed two machine flow-shop scheduling problem (DTMFSP), a special case of classic two machine flow-shop scheduling, with the overall goal of minimising makespan. We apply Differential Evolution to solve the DTMFSP, presenting new best-known results for some benchmark instances from the literature. A comparison to previous approaches from the literature based on the Harmony Search algorithm is also given.