Elitist ant system for the distributed job shop scheduling problem

Abstract

In this paper, we are interested in industrial plants geographically distributed and more precisely the Distributed Job shop Scheduling Problem (DJSP) in multi-factory environment. The problem consists of finding an effective way to assign jobs to factories then, to generate a good operation schedule. To do this, a bio-inspired algorithm is applied, namely the Elitist Ant System (EAS) aiming to minimize the makespan. Several numerical experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of our algorithm applied to the Distributed Job shop Scheduling Problem and the results show the shortcoming of the Elitist Ant System compared to developed algorithms in the literature.