An improved migrating birds optimisation for a hybrid flowshop scheduling with total flowtime minimisation

Migrating birds optimisation (MBO) is a new nature-inspired metaheuristic for combinatorial optimisation problems. This paper proposes an improved MBO to minimise the total flowtime for a hybrid flowshop scheduling problem, which has important practical applications in modern industry. A diversified method is presented to form an initial population spread out widely in solution space. A mixed neighbourhood is constructed for the leader and the following birds to easily find promising neighbouring solutions. A leaping mechanism is developed to help MBO escape from suboptimal solutions. Problem-specific heuristics and local search procedures are added to enhance the MBO's intensification capability. Extensive comparative evaluations are conducted with seven recently published algorithms in the literature. The results indicate that the proposed MBO is effective in comparison after comprehensive computational and statistical analyses.