A BAT ALGORITHM FOR REALISTIC HYBRID FLOWSHOP SCHEDULING PROBLEMS TO MINIMIZE MAKESPAN AND MEAN FLOW TIME

This paper addresses the multistage hybrid flow shop (HFS) scheduling problems. The HFS is the special case of flowshop problem. Multiple parallel machines are considered in each stage in the HFS. The HFS scheduling problem is known to be strongly NP-hard. Hence, many researchers proposed metaheuristic algorithms for solving the HFS scheduling problems. This paper develops a bat algorithm (BA) to the HFS scheduling problem to minimize makespan and mean flow time. To verify the developed algorithm, computational experiments are conducted and the results are compared with other metaheuristic algorithms from the literature. The computational results show that the proposed BA is an efficient approach in solving the HFS scheduling problems.