Minimising makespan for multistage hybrid flowshop scheduling problems with multiprocessor tasks by a hybrid immune algorithm

The scheduling problem of multistage hybrid flowshop with multiprocessor tasks is a core topic for numerous industrial applications but under-represented in the research literature. In this study, a new hybrid immune algorithm based on the features of artificial immune systems and iterated greedy algorithms is presented to minimise the makespan of this problem. To validate the performance of the proposed algorithm, computational experiments are conducted on two well-known benchmark problem sets. The experiment results clearly reveal that the proposed algorithm is highly effective and efficient as compared to three state-of-the-art metaheuristics on the same benchmark instances.