An island model for the no-wait flow shop scheduling problem

Abstract

In this paper we present an evolutionary algorithm (EA) for the no-wait flow shop scheduling problem. This is a new island model with special master-slave structure. In all islands runs a hybrid steady-state algorithm that uses truncation selection, uses only mutation for the generation of the descendants and it improves the solutions with two local search procedures. The mutation is based on the new, modified version of "the EVL method", that is a memory based method. The algorithm was tested on benchmark problems; its results are similar to or better than the results of the particle swarm optimization algorithms. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.