New Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure based on differential evolution algorithm for solving no-wait flowshop scheduling problem

Abstract

Scheduling in a production workshop consists of assigning a number of different tasks to the existing machines with respect to the constraints of the problem in order to optimise the objective function. In this paper, we focus on the NoWait Flow Shop Scheduling Problem (NWFSSP) with the makespan objective. We present a new hybrid algorithm NEWGRASP-DE that combines Greedy Randomised Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) with Differential Evolution Algorithm (DEA). Furthermore, we used an Iterative Local Search (ILS) as an improvement phase in the GRASP method. Our algorithm is tested on instances that have been proposed in the literature. We compared our results with those of different authors. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our algorithm.