Flow Shop Scheduling using Differential Evolution of CRM

The article is focused on the application of differential evolution for solving flow shop problem that belongs to the class of scheduling problems. The scheduling problems arise in diverse areas such as manufacturing systems, production planning, computer design, logistics etc.. Only in very special cases there exist exact polynomial algorithms to reach optimal solution. In most of the other cases, its computational complexity is NP-hard and it seems to be desirable to employ some heuristics to solve it. Nowadays, the use of some methods that are based on metaheuristics is a popular way. One of them is a differential evolution, which belongs to the class of evolutionary techniques. The application of evolutionary algorithms to NP-hard problems generally requires a special modification of these algorithms; therefore the main object of the work is to adapt a canonical version of differential evolution for solving flow shop problem. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is compared with other evolutionary techniques known from the already published results. The available instance of flow shop Car and Rec are used for comparison.