Scheduling flexible job-shops with transportation times: Mathematical models and a hybrid imperialist competitive algorithm

After the completion of a job on a machine, it needs to be transported to the next machine, actually taking some time. However, the transportation times are commonly neglected in the literature. This paper incorporates the transportation times between the machines into the flexible job-shop scheduling problem. We mathematically formulate the problem by two mixed integer linear programming models. Since the problem is NP-hard, we propose an adaptation of the imperialist competitive algorithm hybridized by a simulated annealing-based local search to solve the problem. Various operators and parameters of the algorithm are calibrated using the Taguchi method. The presented algorithm is assessed by comparing it against two other competitive algorithms in the literature. The computational results show that this algorithm has an outstanding performance in solving the problem.