Solving multicriteria scheduling problems in a furniture manufacturing company using a hybrid fruit fly optimization algorithm

Scheduling is an important decision making process in production and operations management. This paperaddresses a hybrid fruit fly optimization algorithm (FFOA) for solving the NP-hard type hybrid flow shop scheduling(HFSS) problems with multicriteria. The objective is to minimize the weighted sum of makespan and mean flow timein a furniture manufacturing company. Constructive heuristics are put on to improve the solution quality at the initialstage. Experiments are also conducted with random problem instances. The results are compared with geneticalgorithm (GA), ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm, simulated annealing (SA) algorithm and particle swarmoptimization (PSO) algorithm addressed earlier in the literature and proved that the proposed algorithm is effectiveand efficient to solve the HFSS problems.