Improved Intelligent Water Drops Optimization for Single and Multiple Objective Job Shop Scheduling

Single objective Job Shop Scheduling Problem (SOJSSP) and Multiple Objective Job Shop Scheduling Problem (MOJSSP) are typical NP-hard optimization problems which have significant values in manufacturing environments. Intelligent Water Drops (IWD) is a new type of meta-heuristics which shows excellent ability of solving optimization problems. In this research, IWD is improved and customized to solve SOJSSP and MOJSSP problems. Experiments have been conducted, and the results show that the enhanced algorithms have comparable if not better performance compared to current literature in solving these two types of problems. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is among the first research employing IWD for solving SOJSSP and MOJSSP.