A novel encoding scheme of PSO for two-machine group scheduling

Abstract

This paper investigates the two-machine flow shop group scheduling problem with the transportation times and sequence-dependent setup times considerations. The objective is to minimize the total completion time. In this paper, a novel encoding scheme of PSO for flow shop group scheduling is proposed to effectively solve various instances with group numbers up to 15. Note that the proposed encoding scheme simultaneously determines the sequence of jobs in each group and the sequence of groups. Three different lower bounds are developed to evaluate the performance of the proposed PSO algorithm. Limited numerical results show that the proposed PSO algorithm performs well for all test problems. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.