Application Research of IICA Algorithm in a Limited-Buffer Scheduling Problem

An improved imperialist competition algorithm (IICA) was proposed to resolve the problem of flexible flow shop scheduling that with limited buffer (LBFFSP). The IICA algorithm adds the elite personal retention strategy, reform operation and the discrete processing on the basis of ICA algorithm. This paper uses an individual selection mechanism based on Hamming distance to improve the ability of initial solution. The prospect is to use the IICA to work out related problems in cloud computing environment. The scheduling problem in the cloud-computing environment needs to consider the optimization of the completion time and cost of using cloud resources. At last, simulation tests and example tests are used to check the usefulness of improved imperialist competition algorithm in solving LBFFSP problem. Compared with standard ICA, the improved ICA has improved in the algorithm evolution process. As such, scheme 4 has a better ability to evolve, and its evolution time is greater than that of scheme 3. Scheme 5 has the best algorithm optimization performance.