Application of Harmony Search on the Taillard Dataset

Abstract

This article examines the effectiveness of Harmony Search on a common production scheduling problem, the Flow Shop Scheduling. During the task, a given number of jobs must be performed by a given number of machines. The goal is to determine the order of the jobs so that the makespan is minimized. Harmony Search is a metaheuristic algorithm that maintains a population of solutions. The algorithm is inspired by musical composition. The algorithm continuously improves its solutions and returns with the best solution when the stopping condition is met. The paper presents Harmony Search, the Flow Shop Scheduling Problem, and then the running results. The running results are also compared with the results published by other researchers.