ABSTRACT

Recent developments in research on decision making have linked up the strings of

optimization with the social behavior of the insects. There have been a host of complex
problems like scheduling, project management, routing etc., that are conveniently
mapped with natural environment and solved through the inspiration of the insects. This
thesis illustrates the application of particle swarm optimization (PSO) approach for
solving a simple and flexible job shop problems.
Scheduling of a job shop is very important in both fields of production
management and combinatorial optimization. However, it is quite difficult to achieve an
optimal solution to this problem with traditional optimization approaches owing to the
high computational complexity.
Particle swarm optimization algorithm is employed to solve the job shop
scheduling problem with an objective of minimizing the maximum completion time of all
the jobs. In the particle representation, the mapping between the particle and the
scheduling solution is established through connecting the operation sequence of all the
jobs with the particle position sequence. According to processing constraints of the
problem, each operation in the operation sequence of all the jobs is assigned on each
machine in turn to form the scheduling solution. The particle representation can ensure
that the scheduling solutions decoded are feasible and can follow the particle swarm
optimization algorithm model. The results of PSO based optimization heuristic are
compared against the results of the benchmark problems. The preliminary results are
quite encouraging and motivating for the researchers to use PSO as a powerful tool in
real time scheduling problems. PSO algorithm is also implemented for real time job shop
scheduling problems where different jobs start at different timings.

i
National Institute of
Technology,Warangal
 LIST OF TABLES

Table No. Title Page No.

4.1 Particle representation for JSP 34
4.2 Processing time and constraints of JSP 36
4.3 The i-th particle representation 36
5.1 Machine sequence in 6*6 problem 43
5.2 Times for the sequence in 6*6 problem 43
5.3 Bench mark problem Results 46
5.4 Flexible job shop example problem 47
5.5 Machine sequence in 6*6 problem 50
5.6 Times for the sequence in 6*6 problem 50

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure No. Title Page No.

1.1 Schematic diagram of flow shop 1

ii
National Institute of
Technology,Warangal
1.2 Schematic diagram of open shop 2
1.3 Schematic diagram of job shop 3
1.4 Different schedules in job shop 6
4.1 Particle swarm (population = 10) in a 2 dimensional space. 23
4.2 A position-velocity relation in a 2-dimensional space 24
4.3 A global swarm vs. local neighborhoods 25
4.4 Simple neighbourhood topologies 26
4.5 The mapping, decoding and updating of the particle 35
4.6 An encoded particle 38
4.7 particles after calculated with equation 39

iii
National Institute of
Technology,Warangal