An effective hybrid Ant Colony Algorithm for the no-wait flow-shop scheduling problem

In this paper, a hybrid Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm is proposed to schedule jobs in a no-wait flowshop with a minimization of maximum completion time (makespan). Due to the fact that this problem is well known for being NP hard, a metaheuristic algorithm based on ant colony optimization algorithm is proposed. In order to improve performance, quality of solution, a novel mechanism in Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) based on insert-and-swap is performing as a local search method. Computational Simulation results based on well-known benchmarks and comparisons with some existing algorithms demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid algorithm