A novel hybrid genetic algorithm to solve the sequence-dependent permutation flow-shop scheduling problem

Flow-shop scheduling problem (FSP) deals with the scheduling of a set of jobs that visit a set of machines in the same order. The FSP is NP-hard, which means that there is no efficient algorithm to reach the optimal solution of the problem. To minimize the make-span of large permutation flow-shop scheduling problems in which there are sequence-dependent setup times on each machine, this paper develops one novel hybrid genetic algorithms (HGA). Proposed HGA apply a modified approach to generate the population of initial chromosomes and also use an improved heuristic called the iterated swap procedure to improve them. Also the author uses three genetic operators to make good new offspring. The results are compared to some recently developed heuristics and computational experimental results show that the proposed HGA performs very competitively with respect to accuracy and efficiency of the solutions.