An efficient imperialist competitive algorithm for scheduling in the two-stage assembly flow shop problem

作者：Seidgar Hany; Kiani Morteza; Abedi Mehdi; Fazlollahtabar Hamed^*

来源：International Journal of Production Research, 2014, 52(4): 1240-1256.

DOI：10.1080/00207543.2013.848490

• two-stage assembly flow shop
• imperialist competitive algorithm
• neural network

This paper considers a two-stage assembly flow shop problem where m parallel machines are in the first stage and an assembly machine is in the second stage. The objective is to minimise a weighted sum of makespan and mean completion time for n available jobs. As this problem is proven to be NP-hard, therefore, we employed an imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) as solution approach. In the past literature, Torabzadeh and Zandieh (2010) showed that cloud theory-based simulated annealing algorithm (CSA) is an appropriate meta-heuristic to solve the problem. Thus, to justify the claim for ICA capability, we compare our proposed ICA with the reported CSA. A new parameters tuning tool, neural network, for ICA is also introduced. The computational results clarify that ICA performs better than CSA in quality of solutions.

• 出版日期2014-2-16