An improved memetic algorithm for the flexible job shop scheduling problem with transportation times

Abstract

In the practical production, the transportation of jobs is existed between different machines. These transportation operations directly affect the production cycle and the production efficiency. In this study, an improved memetic algorithm is proposed to solve the flexible job shop scheduling problem with transportation times, and the optimization objective is minimizing the makespan. In the improved memetic algorithm, an effective simulated annealing algorithm is adopted in the local search process, which combines the elite library and mutation operation. All the feasible solutions are divided into general solutions and local optimal solutions according to the elite library. The general solutions are executed by the simulated annealing algorithm to improve the quality, and the local optimal solutions are executed by the mutation operation to increase the diversity of the solution set. Comparison experiments with the improved genetic algorithm show that the improved memetic algorithm has better search performance and stability.