An Ant Colony Optimization algorithm to solve a 2-machine bicriteria flowshop scheduling problem

Consider the 2-machine flowshop scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing both the total completion time and the makespan criteria. The latter is assumed to be optimized prior to the former. In view of the N P-hardness of the problem an Ant Colony Optimization approach is proposed to solve it. The heuristic also uses feature of Simulated Annealing search and local search algorithms. Computational experiments show its effectiveness compared to existing heuristics. The extension to the total completion time problem is also studied. (C) 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.