Solving lot-streaming flow shop scheduling problems using a discrete harmony search algorithm

The harmony search (HS) algorithm is one of the recent evolutionary computation techniques to solve optimization problems. To make it applicable for lot-streaming flow shop problems, a discrete variant of the HS algorithm (DHS) with job permutations representation is proposed. In the proposed DHS algorithm, a new improvisation scheme is designed to generate feasible job sequences. A local search algorithm based on the insert neighborhood structure is fused to stress the further enhancement capability of the algorithm proposed whereas a restart scheme is employed to avoid the stagnation of the evolution. Extensive computational simulations and comparisons are provided, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DHS against the best performing algorithms from the literature.