The hybrid flow-shop scheduling problem (HFSP) has been of continuing interest for researchers and practitioners since its advent. This paper considers the multistage HFSP with multiprocessor tasks, a core topic for numerous industrial applications. A novel ant colony system (ACS) heuristic is proposed to solve the problem. To verify the developed heuristic, computational experiments are conducted on two well-known benchmark problem sets and the results are compared with genetic algorithm (GA) and tabu search (TS) from the relevant literature. Computational results demonstrate that the proposed ACS heuristic outperforms the existing GA and TS algorithms for the current problem. Since the proposed ACS heuristic is comprehensible and effective, this study successfully develops a near-optimal approach which will hopefully encourage practitioners to apply it to real-world problems.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.