A Discrete Group Search Optimizer for Flow Shop Scheduling Problem with Limited Buffers

Aming at the Flow Shop scheduling problem with limited buffers (LBFSP), this paper proposes a discrete group search optimizer (DGSO) algorithm to minimize the total flow time. The DGSO algorithm adopts the job permutation based representation to enable the continuous group search optimizer algorithm to be used in the scheduling problems directly. And then, a new initialization way is developed to guarantee the initial population with a certain quality and diversity. Moreover, the discrete differential evolution scheme is integrated to improve the algorithm performance. In addition, an orthogonal design is utilized to adjust the parameters of the DGSO algorithm. The simulation results via Taillard benchmark show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.