A hybrid based GA and HS algorithms in blocking flow shop scheduling problems

This paper is concerned with solving the blocking flow shop scheduling problem based Harmony Search and GA for better result. The largest position value (LPV) rule is used to convert continuous harmony vectors into job permutations and an efficient initialization scheme based on a variant of the NEH heuristic, called NEHPWT, is used to construct the initial harmony memory with certain quality and diversity. In the hybrid, HS and GA is employed to solve the blocking flow shop scheduling problems, whereas a local search algorithm based on an insert neighborhood is embedded to enhance the local exploitation ability. The result shows that the hybrid algorithm is better than HS algorithm.