An effective invasive weed optimization algorithm for the flow shop scheduling with intermediate buffers

The flow shop scheduling problem with intermediate buffers has important applications in modern industry. This paper addresses this problem with the objective of minimizing the makespan and presents an effective discrete IWO (DIWO) algorithm. In the proposed DIWO, a Nawaz-Enscore-Ham heuristic is used to generate an initial solution with a certain level of quality. An improved IWO-search mechanism is utilized to evolve in the global space. An efficient local search algorithm is embedded in the algorithm to enhance exploitation. Computational experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DIWO algorithm for solving the problem.