Minimizing makespan for flow shop scheduling problem with intermediate buffers by using hybrid approach of artificial immune system

In this study, three new meta-heuristic algorithms artificial immune system (AIS), iterated greedy algorithm (IG) and a hybrid approach of artificial immune system (AIS-IG) are proposed to minimize maximum completion time (makespan) for the permutation flow shop scheduling problem with the limited buffers between consecutive machines. As known, this category of scheduling problem has wide application in the manufacturing and has attracted much attention in academic fields. Different from basic artificial immune systems, the proposed AIS-IG algorithm is combined with destruction and construction phases of iterated greedy algorithm to improve the local search ability. The performances of these three approaches were evaluated over Taillard, Carlier and Reeves benchmark problems. It is shown that the AIS-IG and AIS algorithms not only generate better solutions than all of the well-known meta heuristic approaches but also can maintain their quality for large scale problems. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.