An effective shuffled frog leaping algorithm for solving hybrid flow-shop scheduling problem

Abstract

In this paper, an effective algorithm based on the shuffled frog leaping algorithm (SFLA) is proposed to solve the hybrid flow-shop (HFS) scheduling problem, which is a strong NP-hard combinational problem with very wide engineering background. By using a special encoding scheme and combining SFLA based memetic search and Meta-Lamarckian local search strategy, the exploration and exploitation abilities are enhanced and well balanced for solving the HFS problems. Simulation results based on some typical problems and comparisons with some existing genetic algorithm and differential evolution demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is effective and robust in solving the HFS problem. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.