Nature-Inspired Algorithms for Bi-Criteria Parallel Machine Scheduling

Abstract

Nature has always been a source of inspiration for human beings. Nature-inspired search-based algorithms have an enormous computational intelligence and capabilities and are observing diverse applications in engineering and manufacturing problems. In this chapter, six nature-inspired algorithms, namely artificial bee colony, bat, black hole, cuckoo search, flower pollination, and grey wolf optimizer algorithms, have been investigated for scheduling of multiple jobs on multiple potential parallel machines. Weighted flow time and tardiness have been used as optimization criteria. These algorithms are very efficient in identifying optimal solutions, but as the size of the problem increases, these algorithms tend to get stuck at local optima. In order to extract these algorithms from local optima, genetic algorithm has been used. Flower pollination algorithm, when appended with GA, is observed to perform better than other counterpart nature-inspired algorithms as well as existing heuristics and meta-heuristics based on MOGA and NSGA-II algorithms.