Hybrid particle swarm optimization with Cauchy distribution for solving reentrant flexible flow shop with blocking constraint

Abstract

This paper addresses a problem of the two-stage flexible flow shop with reentrant and blocking constraints in Hard Disk Drive Manufacturing. This problem can be formulated as a deterministic FFS|stage=2,rcrc, block|Cmax problem. In this study, adaptive Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization with Cauchy distribution (HPSO) was developed to solve the problem. The objective of this research is to find the sequences in order to minimize the makespan. To show their performances, computational experiments were performed on a number of test problems and the results are reported. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms give better solutions than the classical Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for all test problems. Additionally, the relative improvement (RI) of the makespan solutions obtained by the proposed algorithms with respect to those of the current practice is performed in order to measure the quality of the makespan solutions generated by the proposed algorithms. The RI results show that the HPSO algorithm can improve the makespan solution by averages of 14.78%.

Keywords

• Hybrid particle swarm optimization
• Reentrant flexible flow shop
• Blocking constraint
• Hard disk drive manufacturing