A discrete colonial competitive algorithm for hybrid flowshop scheduling to minimize earliness and quadratic tardiness penalties

Recently introduced colonial competitive algorithm (CCA) has shown its excellent capability on different optimization problems. The aim of this paper is to propose a discrete version of this method to determine a schedule that minimizes sum of the linear earliness and quadratic tardiness in the hybrid flowshops scheduling problem with simultaneously considering effects of sequence-dependent setup times and limited waiting time. In other word we assume that the waiting time for each job between two consecutive stages cannot be greater than a given upper bound. Also for this problem, a mixed integer program is formulated. Computational results are presented to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms for problems with different structures.

► This paper proposes a mixed integer program and a discrete version of colonial competitive algorithm for hybrid flowshops scheduling.
► Colonial competitive algorithm is socio-politically motivated optimization algorithm with great performance in both convergence rate and better global optimal achievement that has recently been introduced for solving different optimization problems.
► For the first time some real world assumption is considered in hybrid folowshop such as setup time which is separate from processing times, limited waiting time in buffer among stages and the earliness and quadratic tardiness as objective function are also considered.