The job shop scheduling problem (JSSP) is generally defined as decision-making problems with the aim of optimizing one or more scheduling criteria. Many different approaches, such as simulated annealing (Wu et al., 2005), tabu search (Pezzella & Merelli, 2000), genetic algorithm (Watanabe, Ida, & Gen, 2005), ant colony optimization (Huang & Liao, 2007), neural networks (Wang, Qiao, &Wang, 2001), evolutionary algorithm (Tanev, Uozumi, & Morotome, 2004) and other heuristic approach (Chen & Luh, 2003; Huang & Yin, 2004; Jansen, Mastrolilli, & Solis-Oba, 2005; Tarantilis & Kiranoudis, 2002), have been successfully applied to JSSP. Flexible job shop scheduling problem (FJSSP) is an extension of the classical JSSP which allows an operation to be processed by any machine from a given set. It is more complex than JSSP because of the addition need to determine the assignment of operations to machines. Bruker and Schlie (1990) were among the first to address this problem.
An Improved Ant Colony Optimization for Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem
