Global Bacteria Optimization Meta-Heuristic Algorithm for Jobshop Scheduling

This paper examines the problem of jobshop scheduling with either makespan minimization or total tardiness minimization, which are both known to be NP-hard. The authors propose the use of a meta-heuristic procedure inspired from bacterial phototaxis. This procedure, called Global Bacteria Optimization (GBO), emulates the reaction of some organisms (bacteria) to light stimulation. Computational experiments are performed using well-known instances from literature. Results show that the algorithm equals and even outperforms previous state-of-the-art procedures in terms of quality of solution and requires very short computational time.