Automatic design of hybrid stochastic local search algorithms for permutation flowshop problems with additional constraints

Abstract

Automatic design of stochastic local search algorithms has been shown to be very effective in generating algorithms for the permutation flowshop problem for the most studied objectives including makespan, flowtime and total tardiness. The automatic design system uses a configuration tool to combine algorithmic components following a set of rules defined as a context-free grammar. In this paper we use the same system to tackle two of the most studied additional constraints for these objectives: sequence dependent setup times and no-idle constraint. Additional components have been added to adapt the system to the new problems while keeping intact the grammar structure and the experimental setup. The experiments show that the generated algorithms outperform the state of the art in each case.

Keywords

• Combinatorial optimization
• Stochastic local search algorithms
• Automatic algorithm design
• Permutation flowshop problem
• No-idle
• Sequence dependent setup times