A Discrete Inter-Species Cuckoo Search for flowshop scheduling problems

This paper presents a discrete version of the Inter-Species Cuckoo Search (ISCS) algorithm and illustrates its use for solving two significant types of the flow-shop scheduling problems. These are Hybrid Flow-shop Scheduling (HFS) and Permutation Flow-shop Sequencing Problems (PFSP). Hybrid flowshop scheduling problems are a generalization of flowshops having parallel machines in some stages and these problems are known to be NP-hard. A heuristic rule called the Smallest Position Value (SPV) is used to enable the continuous inter-species cuckoo search to be applied to most types of sequencing problems. Makespan and mean flow time are the objective functions considered and computational experiments are carried out to compare the proposed Discrete Inter-Species Cuckoo Search (DISCS) with other state-of-the-art meta-heuristic algorithms. Experimental results confirm the superiority of DISCS with respect to many other existing metaheuristic search algorithms.