A modified harmony search for flow shop scheduling problem

This paper presents a modified harmony search (HS) for the flow shop scheduling problem, with the objective to minimize the maximum completion time of all jobs, i.e. makespan. Firstly, a simple memory consideration rule based on a recombination operator is employed to generate a new harmony. Secondly, an insertion procedure is used as a pitch adjustment rule. Thirdly, a neighborhood local strategy is embedded into the algorithm to enhance the solution quality. To validate the proposed algorithm, various computational tests are established using a set of 60 instances from Taillard Benchmark [1]. The HS algorithm is compared to two constructive heuristics from literature, the NEH heuristic [2], and the stochastic greedy heuristic (SG) [6]. The obtained results show the superiority of the proposed algorithm in terms of solution quality.