Minimisation of total tardiness in hybrid flowshop scheduling problems with sequence dependent setup times using a discrete firefly algorithm

In this paper, hybrid flowshop (HFS) scheduling problems with sequence dependent setup times (SDST) are considered. The objective is to minimise the total tardiness. As these problems were proved to be strongly NP-hard (non-deterministic polynomial time hard) type combinatorial optimisation problems, exact methods cannot be used to solve the problems. Hence, many heuristics and meta-heuristics were addressed in the literature to solve the problems. In this paper, discrete version of a recently developed bio-inspired meta-heuristic algorithm called as discrete firefly algorithm (DFA) is proposed to solve the problems. Extensive computational experiments are carried out to validate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Computational results reveal the success of the proposed algorithm.