Solving flexible job shop scheduling problems using a hybrid lion optimisation algorithm

Abstract

This paper addresses the flexible job shop scheduling problem (FJSP) with makespan criterion. The FJSP has been proved to be strongly NP-hard. The FJSP is a generalisation and extension of the classical job shop scheduling problem (JSP). As the problem is NP-hard, exact solution techniques cannot be used to tackle the problem. Researchers have proposed several heuristics and meta-heuristics to solve the problem. The lion optimisation algorithm is one of the recently developed meta-heuristic algorithms. A hybrid lion optimisation algorithm (HLOA) is proposed in the present work to solve the FJSP. A heuristic is hybridised with the LOA to improve the solution quality. To the best of our knowledge this is the first reported application of the LOA to solve the scheduling problems. The performance of the proposed algorithm is tested with two different sets of benchmark problems addressed in the literature. Computational results substantiate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.