A Discrete differential evolution with tabu list approach to no-wait flow-shop scheduling

Due to its significance both in theory and industrial application, no-wait flow-shop scheduling problems (NWFSSPs) have received more and more attentions. In this paper, a hybrid permutation-based differential evolution with tabu list (HPDETL) is presented to solve NWFSSP with makespan criteria. More specifically, the proposed HPDETL algorithm employs new permutation-based discrete DE with tabu list (PDETL) to generate new individuals. In addition, a local search based on fast complex heuristic (FCH) is embedded into PDETL to improve its search performance. Experiments and comparisons are conducted based on well-known benchmark instances to test the performance of PDETTL and HPDETL. The computational results show that the HPDETL algorithm can find either competitive or better results than the meta-heuristic and heuristic algorithms reported in recent literature.