Quantum-inspired cuckoo co-search algorithm for no-wait flow shop scheduling

摘要

Minimizing the makespan in no-wait flow shop scheduling problem (NWFSP) is widely applied in various industries. However, it is a NP-hard problem. A novel quantum-inspired cuckoo co-search (QCCS) algorithm is proposed to solve this problem. The QCCS algorithm consists of the following three phases: 1) Quantum representation of solution. 2) A quantum-inspired cuckoo search-differential evolution (QCS-DE) search. 3) Local neighborhood search (LNS) algorithm. Meanwhile, the convergence property of the QCCS algorithm is analyzed theoretically. The Taguchi experiments are further designed for the calibration of parameters. The QCCS algorithm was performed on Rec and Car benchmark instances and compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms, including GA-VNS, HGA, TS-PSO, TMIIG, where the superiority of the proposed algorithm is verified by numerical analyses. In addition, the in-depth statistical analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The numerical results verify that the proposed algorithm has strong optimization ability and can effectively solve the NWFSP with small and medium scale.