A Hybrid Meta-Heuristic to Solve a Multi- Criteria HFS Problem

In this chapter the authors address a hybrid flow shop scheduling problem considering the minimization of the makespan in addition to the sum of earliness and tardiness penalties. This problem is proven to be NP-hard, and consequently the development of heuristic and meta-heuristic approaches to solve it is well justified. So, to deal with this problem, the authors propose a method which consists on the one hand, on using a meta-heuristic based on ant colony optimization algorithm to generate feasible solutions and, on the other hand, on using an aggregation multi-criteria method based on fuzzy logic to assist the decision-maker to express his preferences according to the considered objective functions. The aggregation method uses the Choquet integral. This latter allows to take into account the interactions between the different criteria. Experiments based on randomly generated instances were conducted to test the effectiveness of the approach. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-2086-5.ch009