An ant system with steps counter for the job shop scheduling problem

In this paper, we present an ant system algorithm variant designed to solve the job shop scheduling problem. The proposed approach is based on a recent biological study which showed that natural ants can count their steps when they build the path between the nest and their food source. Experiments using a set of well-known job shop scheduling problems and a comparison against state-of-the-art techniques show that the proposed approach can reduce the number of evaluations performed without a degradation of performance. Additionally, our proposed approach reduces the number of parameters that need to be tuned by the user (specifically the parameters that balance the importance between the pheromone trail and heuristic values), with respect to the original ant system algorithm.