An Improved Ant Colony Algorithm for a Single-machine Scheduling Problem with Setup Times

Motivated by industrial applications we study a single-machine scheduling problem in which all the jobs are mutually independent and available at time zero. The machine processes the jobs sequentially and it is not idle if there is any job to be processed. The operation of each job cannot be interrupted. The machine cannot process more than one job at a time. A setup time is needed if the machine switches from one type of job to another. The objective is to find an optimal schedule with the minimal total jobs' completion time. While the sum of jobs' processing time is always a constant, the objective is to minimize the sum of setup times. Ant colony optimization (ACO) is a meta-heuristic that has recently been applied to scheduling problem. In this paper we propose an improved ACO-Branching Ant Colony with Dynamic Perturbation (DPBAC) algorithm for the single-machine scheduling problem. DPBAC improves traditional ACO in following aspects: introducing Branching Method to choose starting points; improving state transition rules; introducing Mutation Method to shorten tours; improving pheromone updating rules and introducing Conditional Dynamic Perturbation Strategy. Computational results show that DPBAC algorithm is superior to the traditional ACO algorithm.