Application of Social Spider Optimization for Permutation Flow Shop Scheduling Problem

Abstract

Permutation flow shop scheduling problem (PFSP) is an NP-complete problem with a wide range of applications in many real-world applications. Social spider optimization (SSO) is a swarm intelligence algorithm proposed for continuous optimization problems. Recently, SSO has received increased interest in the field of combinatorial optimization as well. For this reason, in this paper, SSO algorithm is proposed to solve the PFSP with make span minimization. The proposed algorithm has been tested on 141 well-known benchmark instances and compared against six other conventional and best-so-far metaheuristics. The obtained results show that SSO outperforms some of the compared works although they are hybrid methods.