Flexible job shop scheduling with due window—a two-pheromone ant colony approach

Recently, the companies reduce the manufacturing costs and increase capacity efficiency in the competitive environment. Therefore, to balance workstation loading, the hybrid production system is necessary, so that, the flexible job shop system is the most common production system, and there are parallel machines in each workstation. In this study, the due window and the sequential dependent setup time of jobs are considered. To satisfy the customers’ requirement, and reduce the cost of the storage costs at the same time, the sum of the earliness and tardiness costs is the objective. In this study, to improve the traditional ant colony system, we developed the two pheromone ant colony optimization (2PH-ACO) to approach the flexible job shop scheduling problem. Computational results indicate that 2PH-ACO performs better than ACO in terms of sum of earliness and tardiness time.