A NEW HEURISTIC-EM FOR PERMUTATION FLOWSHOP SCHEDULING

Abstract This paper applies the new developed heuristic electromagnetism-like mechanism (EM) algorithm for the permutation flowshop scheduling problem. This algorithm simulates the electromagnetism theory by considering each solution as an electrical charge. Through the attraction-repulsion of the charges, solutions move to the optimality without being trapped into local optima. We make use of random key for building the relationships between the algorithm and the problem model. When comparing the computational results with GA and other heuristics, EM showed great superiority than the others, especially for some large scaled scheduling problems.

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