Combining CA and PSO to solve flexible job shop scheduling problem

The flexible job shop scheduling problem (FJSP) is an extension of the classic job shop scheduling problem (JSP), which breaks through the uniqueness of limit resources, allows a procedure in many machines processing and one machine processing many kinds of different types of procedures. It is more practical and complex than JSP. The computational complexity of FJSP is much higher, which disables exact solution methods and makes heuristic approaches more qualified. A hybrid optimization algorithm, CPSO, based on the cultural algorithm and particle swarm optimization algorithm, is proposed in this paper to solve the FJSP. The objective is to minimize makespan. Computational results show that this hybrid method is able to solve efficiently these kinds of problems.