Computational Intelligence Approach for Flow Shop Scheduling Problem

Abstract

Flow shop scheduling is an important tool for manufacturing and engineering, where it can have a major impact on the productivity of a process. Because the resources used in manufacturing activities are very limited, flow shop scheduling becomes a very important concept in managerial decision-making. It deals with the allocation of resources to tasks over given time periods with a view to optimize one or more objective functions like makespan or mean tardiness resulting in reduced production time and costs. During recent years, effective computational intelligent algorithms are developed and successfully employed for achieving the optimum output of the flow shop problems. This chapter provides a computational intelligence approach for flow shop scheduling.