Metaheuristic algorithms are often nature-inspired, and they are becoming very powerful in solving global optimization problems. More than a dozen of major metaheuristic algorithms have been developed over the last three decades, and there exist even more variants and hybrid of metaheuristics. This paper intends to provide an overview of nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms, from a brief hi...

In this paper, we first introduce a generalized version of open shop scheduling (OSS), called generalized cyclic open shop scheduling (GCOSS) and then develop a hybrid method of metaheuristic to solve this problem. Open shop scheduling is concerned with processing n jobs on m machines, where each job has exactly m operations and operation i of each job has to be processed on machine i . However...

Nowadays, there is a great deal of attention for regulations of carbon emissions to enforce the decision-makers of production and distribution networks to redesign their systems satisfactorily. The literature has seen a rapid interest in developing novel metaheuristics to solve this problem as a complicated optimization problem. Such difficulties motivate us to address a production-distribution...

This paper addresses the multistage hybrid flow shop (HFS) scheduling problems. The HFS is the special case of flowshop problem. Multiple parallel machines are considered in each stage in the HFS. The HFS scheduling problem is known to be strongly NPhard. Hence, many researchers proposed metaheuristic algorithms for solving the HFS scheduling problems. This paper develops a bat algorithm (BA) t...

The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is the problem of finding the shortest tour through all the nodes that a salesman has to visit. The TSP is probably the most famous and extensively studied problem in the field of combinatorial optimization. Because this problem is an NP-hard problem, practical large-scale instances cannot be solved by exact algorithms within acceptable computational times. ...

This paper considers the problem of scheduling hybrid flowshops with machine availability constraints (MAC) to minimize makespan. The paper deals with a specific case of MAC caused by preventive maintenance (PM) operations. Contrary to previous papers considering fixed or/and conservative policies, we explore a case in which PM activities might be postponed or expedited while necessary. Regardi...

The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is the problem of finding the shortest tour through all the nodes that a salesman has to visit. The TSP is probably the most famous and extensively studied problem in the field of combinatorial optimization. Because this problem is an NP-hard problem, practical large-scale instances cannot be solved by exact algorithms within acceptable computational times. ...

In this paper we use a recently proposed metaheuristic, the Ant System, to solve the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) in its basic form, i.e. with capacity and distance restrictions, one central depot and identical vehicles. A \hybrid" Ant System algorithm is rst presented and then improved using problem speciic information (savings, capacity utilization). Experiments on various aspects of the alg...