Distributed assembly permutation flow shop problem; Single seekers society algorithm

The distributed manufacturing and assembly systems have an important role at the point of overcoming the difficulties faced by today's mass-production industry. By using both of these systems together in the same production system, the advantages of this integration can make industries more flexible and stronger. Besides, optimizing these systems is more complicated since the multiple production systems can undoubtfully affect the production system’s performance. In this paper, two new mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) models are proposed for the distributed assembly permutation flow shop problem (DAPFSP), inspiring by the multiple-travelling salesman structure. Moreover, a single seekers society (SSS) algorithm is proposed for solving the DAPFSP to minimize the maximum completion time of all products. The performance of the proposed MILP models is evaluated using 900 small-sized benchmark instances. The proposed MILP models were effective and were able to find more optimal solutions or improve the best-found solutions for the small-sized DAPFSP benchmark instances. Similarly, the SSS algorithm is statistically compared with the best-known algorithms developed for solving the DAPFSP on 900 small and 810 large-sized benchmark instances. The proposed SSS algorithm shows superior performance compared to other algorithms in solving the small-sized DAPFSP instances in terms of finding better solutions. In addition, it is as effective as the best performing algorithms developed to solve the large-sized DAPFSP instances. Furthermore, the best-found solutions for 40 numbers of test problems reported to be improved in this paper.