Ant colony optimization for FOP shop scheduling: a case study on different pheromone representations

Abstract

In this work we deal with the FOP shop scheduling problem which is a general scheduling problem including job shop scheduling, open shop scheduling and mixed shop scheduling as special cases. The aim of this paper is to compare different pheromone representations taken from the literature with our new approach. The pheromone representations are used by an ant colony optimization algorithm to construct solutions to the FOP shop scheduling problem.