A discrete artificial bee colony algorithm for the permutation flow shop scheduling problem with total flowtime criterion

Very recently, Jarboui et al. [1] (Computers & Operations Research 36 (2009) 2638–2646) and Tseng and Lin [2] (European Journal of Operational Research 198 (2009) 84–92) presented a novel estimation distribution algorithm (EDA) and a hybrid genetic local search (hGLS) algorithm for the permutation flowshop scheduling (PFSP) with the total flowtime (TFT) criterion, respectively. Both algorithms generated excellent results, thus improving all the best known solutions reported in the literature so far. However, in this paper, we present a discrete artificial bee colony (DABC) algorithm hybridized with an iterated greedy (IG) and iterated local search (ILS) algorithms embedded in a variable neighborhood search (VNS) procedure based on swap and insertion neighborhood structures. We also present a hybrid version of our previous discrete differential evolution (hDDE) algorithm employing the IG and VNS structure too. The performance of the DABC and hDDE is highly competitive to the EDA and hGLS algorithms in terms of both solution quality and CPU times. Ultimately, 43 out of 60 best known solutions provided very recently by the EDA and hGLS algorithms are further improved by the DABC and hDDE algorithms with short-term search.