A novel co-evolutionary quantum differential algorithm for blocking flowshop
scheduling problem with makespan minimization *
MA Pingkang, Sun Daoqing**, Yi Jingwei, WANG Hongtao
School of Mathematics and Computer Science, Anhui Normal University,
Wuhu, Anhui 241003, China
Email: sundq1966@163.com
Abstract—A novel Co-evolutionary Quantum Differential
Algorithm (CQDA) is proposed for the Blocking Flowshop
Scheduling Problem (BFSP) to minimize the makespan. The
CQDA combines Quantum-inspired Evolutionary Algorithm
(QEA) with Differential Evolutionary (DE). A novel quantum
rotating gate is designed to control the evolutionary trend and
increase the diversity of population. An effective QEA-VNS co-
evolutionary strategy is also developed to optimize and
improve the current best solution. Compared with several
related algorithms by actual experiments on the Taillard’s
benchmark instances, the results show that the performance of
CQDA is superior to the efficient heuristic algorithm NEH
LS
,
and it drops down about 7% generated optimal solutions to the
Average Relative Percentage Deviation(ARPD).
Keywords- blocking flowshop scheduling; Quantum-inspired
Evolutionary Algorithm (QEA); Differential Evolutionary (DE);
co-evolutionary; makespan
I. INTRODUCTION
1
Flowshop Scheduling Problem (FSP) is a classical
combinational optimization problem, which applied widely
in many different industrial environments, such as
metallurgical, chemical, pharmaceuticals, textile, etc. The
problem is described as: a set N of n unrelated jobs is to be
processed on a set M of m machines. These machines are
disposed in series and each job needs to visit all of them in
the same order. This order can be assumed, without loss of
generality, to be 1… m. Therefore, each job j, j
∈
N is
composed of m tasks. The all machine processing times of
jobs are known in advance, non-negative and deterministic.
They are denoted by P
j,i
, j
∈
N, i
∈
M. The objective is to
obtain a production sequence of the n jobs on the m
machines so that a giver criterion is optimized. The
Blocking Flowshop Scheduling Problem (BFSP) is a further
constraint than the FSP. In the BFSP, because of the lack of
intermediate buffer storage between consecutive machines,
a job has to remain in the current machine until the next
machine is available, even if it has completed the process in
this machine. This increases the waiting time or productive
cycle and thus influences the production efficiency [1]. For
the computational complexity, it has been proved to be NP-
hard in the strong sense [2] for the BFSP with more than
two machines. In recent years, particle swarm algorithm,
shuffled frog leaping algorithm, artificial bee colony
*
Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of
China (Grant No.61472004 and No.61472005)
** Corresponding author. Tel. : +86 015855969300
algorithm, harmony search, intelligent optimization
algorithm etc. has been successfully applied to solute the
problems of BFSP [1-5], and it get better optimization effect
then before, but most of these studies only consider the
application of single algorithms, not with the other
advantages of the proposed algorithm, it is easy to produce
premature convergence phenomenon. Therefore, there are
further improve to the quality of algorithms need to be
processed.
Quantum-inspired Evolutionary Algorithm (QEA) is a
hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm by combining quantum
computation and evolutionary computation [6] together. It
uses quantum superposition, entanglement and coherence
through q-bit coding chromosome, introducing the quantum
rotation, crossover and mutation operator to achieve the
evolution of the population. By using the information of the
current best individual, it can update the quantum the
revolving door to accelerate the convergence of the
algorithm. The algorithm has a small population size, rapid
convergence and strong global search capability. It is easy
to realize as well. So it is widely used in automatic control,
logic circuit design, information security, and multi-
objective optimization fields [7-10].
In order to solve the BFSP effectively, a novel Co-
evolutionary Quantum Differential Algorithm (CQDA) is
proposed, which is based on QEA, by using the differential
evolution design theory [11] of quantum rotation gate and
the population evolution direction can be controlled. And
then the QEA-VNS (Variable Neighborhood Search) co-
evolutionary scheme is used to increase the algorithm's
global search ability. The simulation experimental results,
which are based on the typical examples, show that CQDA
can effectively improve the quality of the solution, and it is
suitable for large scale BFSP as well.
The paper is organized as follows. The description of
the BFSP formulation is provided in Section 2. After a brief
introduction of QGA is presented, the structure of proposed
algorithm is described in detail in Section 3 and Section 4
respectively. The experimental results are shown and
analyzed in Section 5. The concluding remarks are present
in Section 6 to end this paper.
II. D
ESCRIPTION OF BFSP
In BFSP, the general optimization goals are to
minimize the maximum common makespan, total
completion time or the total delay time. Among of them, to
minimize the maximum completion time means that the