Flow Shop Scheduling Problem with Transportation Times, Two-Robots and Inputs/Outputs with Limited Capacity

In this paper we study a generalized flow-shop problem with two identical transport robots between machines. Besides transportation times for the jobs, empty moving times for the robots are taken into account. The objective is to minimize the Makespan. An ant colony algorithm with appropriate probability transfer structures is proposed. Computational results are presented for test data arising from flow-shop benchmark instances enlarged by transportation and empty moving times.

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