An Improved Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm for Permutation Flowshop Scheduling to Minimize Makespan

An improved Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm is put forward in this paper, with the aim of solving Permutation Flow shop Scheduling Problem (PFSP), which takes the minimum of make span as objective function. Also, we integrate NEH heuristic with ACO for scheduling problem cooperatively, define the heuristic information of ACO via make span increment, and come up with a new priority rule for PFSP. A local search procedure based on insertion neighborhood of PFSP is introduced into our algorithm to avoid a local optimum and to improve solution quality. Experiment results show that the proposed algorithm is effective and competitive.