Parallel flow shop scheduling problem using quantum algorithm

Abstract

Quantum algorithm is applied to Parallel Flow shop scheduling problem which has the characters of the parallel machines scheduling and the flow shop scheduling. In this paper, quantum bit encoding strategy of quantum algorithm is designed to a general Parallel Flow shop problem with the objective of minimizing Makespan. All the scheduling problems are represented by the quantum bits. This algorithm is tested on some randomly generated problems with different scale sizes and compared with GA algorithms. Computational results show that the QA and the encoding strategy have shown exciting performance in obtaining the most accurate and optimal solution. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.