Electromagnetism-like mechanism algorithm for fuzzy flow shop scheduling problems

In many real-world applications, processing times may vary dynamically due to human factors or operating faults and there are some other uncertain factors in the scheduling problems. In this paper, fuzzy sets are used to model uncertain due dates and processing times of jobs, and a novel global algorithm which is electromagnetism-like mechanism (EM) algorithm is presented to deal with this fuzzy flow shop scheduling problem. Two objectives are considered in this paper which aims to maximize the average agreement index (AI) and minimize the maximum of fuzzy completion time. Finally, some problems from other papers are choosen to test the fuzzy flow shop scheduling algorithm based on EM, and the computational results show the feasibility and validity of this algorithm.