An ant colony algorithm for permutation flow shop problem

In this paper, a new ant colony optimization algorithm, called finite grade ant colony optimization, is proposed to solve permutation flow shop problem, its main characteristic is that the updated quantities of pheromone trails are independent of objective function values, and the heuristic information provide by Moccellin is adopted. The developed algorithm has been applied to the benchmark problems given by Taillard, Comparison results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed algorithm is promising.