An Improved Ant Colony Optimization for Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem

Abstract

Abstract-This paper deals with the flexible job shop scheduling problem (FJSP) with the objective of minimizing the makespan. An improved ant colony optimization was proposed to avoid falling into the local optimum and time consuming exist in the basic ant colony optimization (ACO). Computational results show that the proposed improved ant colony optimization algorithm can obtain effective solutions in very short and nearly zero time and is comparable with some other heuristic algorithms and can effectively solve the FJSP.