An improved bio-inspired methodology to solve flow shop scheduling problems

Optimization is a mathematical discipline, which involves the operation of finding minima and maxima of functions. Scheduling refers to resource allocation process, which is used to complete activities in an efficient manner. This paper represents the efficiency of Modified Bacterial Foraging Optimization algorithm. In this research work Bacterial Foraging Optimization was hybridized with Ant Colony Optimization and a new technique for solving Flow Shop Scheduling Problem was proposed. The proposed Modified Bacterial Foraging Optimization was implemented to solve the Benchmark instances of Flow Shop Scheduling Problem. Results have shown that the proposed Modified Bacterial Foraging Optimization has outperformed Bacterial Foraging Optimization in arriving at improved best makespan for various test instances of Flow Shop Scheduling Problem.