Ant Colony Optimization for Solving a Bi-Criteria
Hybrid Flow Shop Problem
Safa Khalouli, Fatima Ghedjati and Abdelaziz Hamzaoui
CReSTIC-Reims
UFR Sciences Exactes et Naturelles
Moulin de la Housse, BP 1039, 51687 Reims cedex 2, France
Email: safa.khalouli@etudiant.univ-reims.fr;
{fatima.ghedjati, abdelaziz.hamzaoui}@univ-reims.fr
Abstract—In this paper we address a bi-criteria hybrid flow
shop scheduling problem consisting in the earliness and tardiness
penalties with different job due dates. This problem is proven
to be NP-hard, and consequently the development of heuristic
and meta-heuristic approaches to solve it is well justified. So,
we propose an ant colony optimization method based on the ant
colony system (ACS) to deal with this problem. Our proposed
method has several features, including some heuristics that specif-
ically take into account both earliness and tardiness penalties
to compute the heuristic values. The performance of our ACS
algorithm is tested by numerical experiments on a large number
of randomly generated problems. A Comparison with solution
performance obtained by some constructive heuristics based on
some dispatching rules are presented. The results show that our
proposed method performs better than the constructive heuristics.
Index Terms—ant colony optimization, ant colony system,
scheduling, hybrid flow shop, bi-criteria, earliness/tardiness.
I. I NTRODUCTION
In the last decade, scheduling in a hybrid or multi-processor
flow shop (HFS) has received attention because of its impor-
tance from both theoretical and practical points of view. This
problem has been showed as an adequate model for the study
of a great number of production systems. Thus, it is widely
used in process industries. The manufacturing environment of a
HFS is considered as an extension of the classical flow shop.
In fact, it presents a multistage production process with the
property that all the jobs have to pass through a number of
stages in the same order with several parallel machines at
each stage. The duplication of the number of machines in
some stages introduces additional flexibility to the production
process. HFS models differ in the type of machines at the
stage: they can be identical, uniform or unrelated [1]. In this
paper, parallel machines are assumed to be identical. As a
consequence, the HFS problem results in two subproblem: the
routing problem (ie., the assignment of operations to machines)
and the scheduling problem (ie., sequencing the operations on
the machines).
This paper addresses a bi-criteria HFS scheduling problem
which is the earliness/tardiness penalties (ET) [2]. The ET
problem encompasses a category of problem with the objective
to complete each job as close to its due date possible. It
represents a non-regular optimization criterion based on due
dates [3]. This objective represents just in time (JIT) pro-
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c 2008 IEEE
duction concept. In fact, in a JIT environment, minimizing
earliness would reduce inventory costs and/or deterioration of
product while minimizing tardiness would reduce a late cost
or the loss of customers. In this scenario both early and tardy
completion of jobs is disadvantageous to manufacturers and
customers. Each job has a distinct earliness or tardiness penalty
weight, which represents the importance of a job production
systems. It is shown that the two-stage HFS problem, with
only one stage consisting of more than one identical parallel
machines, is NP-hard [4] in the strong sense with the makespan
criterion. Earliness and tardiness criteria with distinct due dates
usually induce NP-complete problems [5]. So, our considered
problem is NP-hard. Therefore, the development of heuristics
that can give optimal or near optimal solutions is well justified.
For solving scheduling problem, various intelligent heuristics
and meta-heuristics have become popular such as simulated
annealing (SA), tabu search (TS), multi-agent system (MAS),
genetic algorithm (GA) and ant colony optimization algorithm
(ACO). The literature for HFS problem has adopt regular
measures of performance, mainly the makespan, the sum of
completion time, the tardiness. However, most of the articles
that tackle ET problems deal with single machine [6]–[8] and
parallel machine scheduling problems [9]. Some other schedul-
ing problems with ET costs have been studied in the literature.
Rajendran and Alicke [10] developed some dispatching rules
to solve the flow shop ET problem with bottleneck machines.
In [11] the authors proposed a MAS approach to solve the
job shop ET problem with common due date. For the job
shop ET with time windows an ACO algorithm is presented
by Huang and Yang [12]. To deal with the flexible job shop
ET problem, Wu and Weng [13] proposed a MAS scheduling
method. To our knowledge, there is a limited literature focused
on the ET criterion for solving HFS scheduling problems.
In [14] three meta-heuristic approaches based on the SA,
TS and a hybrid SA/TS have been used to solve the HFS
problem which minimizes the cost criterion consisting of the
total weighted earliness, the total weighted tardiness and the
total weighted waiting time. Some existing heuristic solution
approaches for the classical permutation flow shop problem
have been generalized for the HFS problem with controllable
jobs and assignable due dates with the sum of earliness and
tardiness penalties, weighted completion time of jobs and the
costs of due date assignments [3].
In this paper, a meta-heuristic algorithm based on the ant
colony system (ACS) is used to solve the HFS problem with
ET penalties. The remainder of this paper is organized as
follows. The HFS problem is described in section 2. Section
3 presents some constructive heuristics based on some priority
rules for solving the considered problem. In section 4, we
describe our proposed ACS approach. The choice of the
parameters values of our ACS algorithm, the test instances
and the computational results are provided in section 5. In
section 6, some final concluding remarks and future research
directions are given.
II. S CHEDULING PROBLEM FORMULATION
The following notations are used throughout this paper:
O : set of operations,
i : index of stages (i = 1, 2, . . . , S),
j : index of jobs (j = 1, 2, . . . , n),
Oij : operation of jobs j on stage i,
pij : processing time of job j on stage i,
Cj : completion time of job j,
dj : due date of job j,
Ej : earliness of job j,
Tj : tardiness of job j,
hj : earliness penalty weight of job j,
wj : tardiness penalty weight of job j,
D : the scheduling objective.
The hybrid or flexible flow shop is a generalization of the
traditional flow shop defined by a set of processing stages.
Each stage i consists of a given number mi (mi ≥ 1) of
identical parallel machines, denoted by Mi = (Mi1 , Mi2 , . . . ,
Mimi ). The machines are assumed available from time zero.
A set of n jobs has to be processed consecutively on the S
machine centers M1 , M2 , . . . , MS in that order. Thus, each job
j needs several operations (O1j , O2j , . . . , OSj ), where Oij can
be processed on one of the machines at the ith stage during
an uninterrupted pij time units. An operation Oij can start
only after the completion of the (i − 1) previous operations.
We assume that a machine can only perform one operation at
a time. The objective is to jointly minimize the sum of the
earliness and tardiness costs by finding an optimal or a near
optimal schedule:
⎛ ⎞
 n
D = min ⎝ (hj Ej + wj Tj )⎠ (1)
j=1
where Ej = max {0, dj − Cj } and Tj = max {Cj − dj , 0}.
Using the standard notation in the scheduling literature
( [15], [16]) this problem is denoted by :
n
 agent system formed by several artificial ants. An artificial
F HS, (P Mi )Si=1 |dj | (hj Ej + wj Tj ).
j=1
2008 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC 2008)
III. C ONSTRUCTIVE HEURISTIC METHODS
In this section, we present four constructive heuristics based
on some static dispatching rules used for solving the classical
flow shop scheduling problem with ET costs [10]:
1) EDD (earliest due date): in each center, arrange the
operations according to increasing values dj ,
2) ODD (operation due date): in each center, arrange the
operations according to increasing values of the priority index
dij ,
 i    S 
dij = dj × pj pj
=1 =1
3) DD/BJ [10]: in this case the dispatching decision con-
cerning a job j is made with respect to the due date computed
depending upon the position of the stage i, on which it is
executed, relatively to the bottleneck stage q. The priority index
(denoted Zj ) for the DD/BJ rule is defined by:
dqj , if j ≤ q
Zj =
dj , if j > q
The objective of this rule is to render the jobs adhere to their
operation due dates focused on either the bottleneck stage
or the job due date. Then in each stage, the operations are
arranged on the increasing values of Zj ,
4) TPTDD/BJ [10]: this rule consider in addition to the
properties of the DD/BJ rule, the total processing time. The
priority index for job j (denoted by Zj ) is determined by the
following relations:
⎧ i
⎪
⎪ 
⎪ dqj +
⎪ pj , if j ≤ q
⎨
Zj = =1
⎪  S
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎩ d j + pj , if j > q
=1
Then in each stage, the operations are arranged on the
increasing values of Zj .
Each of the proposed constructive heuristics arranges the
operations on each stage in a list by using one of the above
priority rules. For the assignment problem, we use the first
available machine rule (FAM).
IV. P ROPOSED META - HEURISTIC
The ant colony optimization algorithms form a class of
meta-heuristic based on a natural phenomenon: the behavior
of ants in their cohabitation in colonies. In fact, the real ants
can find the shortest path from their nest to a food source
without visual cue by using a chemical volatile substance
called pheromone. This latter represents the mechanism of their
communication and cooperation. So, the basic idea of ACO is
to model the problem to solve as the search for the minimum
cost path in a graph. It has been introduced for the first time by
[17] to solve the traveling salesman problem. It uses a multi-
ant is different from a natural counterpart by the following
characteristics:
1441
 • it has a visual cue (not completely blind as a real ant).
Indeed, it uses a value called visibility or heuristic value
which finds information about the specific problem. This
value can influence the choice of the ant and guided it
differently;
• it has a memory which is used to store the search history;
• it can manage the deposited quantity of pheromone ac-
cording to the quality of the solution; moreover it is
possible to have various types of pheromone.
The ACO meta-heuristics are evolutionary methods. They
have the feature to seek solutions basing on the totality of
the population. Thus, each ant uses the collective experience
to find a solution to the problem. A solution is built step by
step and the choice made by an ant depends on the quantity
of pheromone and the heuristic value. ACO algorithms have
been successfully used for solving a range of combinatorial
optimization problems such as, traveling salesman problem,
the vehicle routing problem, the quadratic assignment problem
and the scheduling problem. The first ACO algorithm is called
ant system (AS) [17]. Then, AS was improved and extended.
The improved versions include the ant colony system (ACS)
[18] and the MAX-MIN ant system (MMAS) [19], etc.
Our suggested method consists on solving the problem in
two phases. The first phase consists in some static heuristics
to deal with the assignment problem. The second phase is
dedicated to the sequencing problem. This latter sub-problem
is solved by adapting the ACS algorithm [20].
A. Assignment problem
To each repartition of the operations on the machines set,
we associate an assignment. Then, each operation has to be
assigned to a machine according to a specific technique of
the scheduling generator. Indeed, if there are multiple choices
of machines, the assignment of the operations can be done
by static or dynamic rules [21]. In case of static rules, the
assignment is realized before the scheduling process and thus
remains invariant along the process. In the other case, the
rules use an instantaneous knowledge of the system. As a
consequence, they determine the operations priorities during
the process of scheduling.
To solve the assignment problem, we propose the static
dispatching rules presented in section 3. The obtained best
solution of these latter is chosen for the affectation of the
operations on the different machines.
B. Scheduling Problem
There are a number of design decisions to make when devel-
oping an ACO algorithm to tackle a combinatorial optimization
problem [22]. The first issue is to represent this problem
with a graph model solvable by the ACS approach. We have
also to choose an adequate pheromone model representation
and an heuristic value which can find information about the
specific problem. They are two primordial components, which
guide move selection and, as a consequence they influence
system performance. Another important point for the ACO
algorithm, in order to achieve feasible solutions, is to respect
1442 2008 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC 2008)
the precedence constraints of the problem at each construction
step. This is ensured by using a restricted list (called candidate
list) of all the operations that can be selected at each time. In
what follows, we expose these components in details.
1) Representation of the problem by a disjunctive graph:
To apply the ACS approach, we represent the problem by a
disjunctive graph. In [23], the authors proposed a disjunctive
graph G = {A, C, U } for the HFS problem. A is the node
set, consisting of all the operations and two fictive nodes
marking the beginning and the end of each job j. C is the
set of conjunctive (directed) arcs representing the precedence
relationships between the operations of the same job and
U is the set of disjunctive (undirected) edges. Each pair of
operations in a stage i is related by an edge. Then, a feasible
schedule for the problem is obtained by turning the edges of
mutually disjoint cliques into arcs.
2) Pheromone model: Many pheromone models, for
scheduling problem, are based on assigning a pheromone
value τ (Oij , Ohl ) on every pair of operations Oij , Ohl ∈ O
as shown in [24]. In this last representation, the pheromone
value bias the choosing of an ant traversing two sequenced
operations Oij and Ohl regardless the machines to which
they are assigned. Other pheromone representations have been
presented in literature [22]. In the relation-learning model
representation [22], pheromone values are assigned to pairs of
related operations: in this case two operations Oij , Ohl ∈ O
are related if they have to be processed on the same machine
resource. Thus, pheromone influences the relative order of
operations requiring the same machine.
As the aim of our problem is to sequencing a set of
operations through a set of machines, we try to influence
ants building a solution in ordering operations treated on
a same machine by combining the two models exposed
above. The proposed pheromone model consists on assigning
a pheromone value τ (Oij , Ohl ) on every pair of operations,
but these values are different according to the machines to
which they are assigned. In fact, in our representation, the
quantity of pheromone assigned to pairs of related operations
is set more important than those not related. An initial quantity
of pheromone is assigned to every arc connecting a pair of
operations. This initial pheromone τ0 level is assumed to be
more important if operations are related.
3) Heuristic value: The heuristic value η(Oij , Ohl ) finds
information about the specific problem. It is used to estimate
the desirability of transition from an operation Oij to another
operation Ohl . In case of scheduling problem, the heuristic
value is different to the reciprocal distance from a node to
another as proposed in the ACS algorithm for the TSP problem
[18]. It can be used to represent information related to the
partial sequencing at a time. In order to bias the transition
probabilities, we propose to adopt an heuristic that specifically
takes into account both the earliness and the tardiness costs to
compute the heuristic value. The proposed heuristic has been
used essentially for solving the single machine ET problem [6],
[8]. The heuristic value η(Oij , Ohl ) is computed according to
the following equation:
⎧ edges become less attractive for the other ants. Indeed, this
⎨ Wl , if sl ≤ 0
η(Oij , Ohl ) = Wl − (sl × K), if 0 < sl < 1/K . (2)
⎩ optima. When an ant k selects an operation, a local updating
Hl , otherwise
where:
Wl = wl /phl ,
Hl = hl /phl ,
sl = dl − t − phl is the slack of job l at time t,
K = (Hl + Wl ) max{0, p − phl },
p is the average processing time of all the jobs.
This dispatching rule uses a priority function reflecting
the tardiness cost as its slack sl becomes small, while the
earliness cost dominates when the slack is large [8].
4) Construction procedure: To construct a feasible solu-
tion, each ant builds independently a sequence of operations by
performing the construction step. From an existing operation
sequence, an ant k positioned on node Oij must choose from
the candidate list Lk (which is the set of feasible successor
operations that remain to be visited by ant k), the next
operation y to append by using a pseudo-random rule, based
on the pheromone trails and the heuristic value. This rule is
formally given by the following two equations [18]:
⎧  
β
⎪
⎨ arg Omax [τ (Oij , Ohl )] · [η(Oij , Ohl )] ,
hl ∈Lk
y= if q ≤ q0 . (3)
⎪
⎩
Y, if q > q0
where β is a parameter which determines the relative
importance between τ and η. q is a random number uniformly
distributed in [0, 1] and q0 a parameter that determines the
relative importance between exploitation and exploration (0 ≤
q0 ≤ 1). Indeed, the system tends to carry out an intensification
if q ≤ q0 , and consequently the algorithm exploits more
information, collected by the system. Otherwise, the system
tends towards a diversification. Y is a random variable selected
according to the random-proportional rule [18]:
β
[τ (Oij , Y )] · [η(Oij , Y )]
pk (Oij , Y ) =  β
. (4)
[τ (Oij , Ohl )] · [η(Oij , Ohl )]
Ohl ∈Lk
The procedure is repeated until all the operations are
selected. The selected operations are successively stored into
a tabu list which is used to record the visited nodes of the
current schedule. It is noted that the tabu list is different from
the tabu search method and its goal is to avoid an operation
to be visited twice.
5) Pheromone updating mechanism: The mechanism of
updating pheromone is used to simulate the changes in the
amount of pheromone. In fact, this latter is augmented due to
the new pheromone deposit by ants and diminished according
to the pheromone evaporation. Two kinds of pheromone up-
dating strategies are proposed in [18]:
• Local pheromone updating rule: in order not to influence
the choice of the other ants, the local updating rule reduces the
2008 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC 2008)
pheromone level of the visited edges by an ant k. Thus, these
rule is used to shuffle the tour of the other ants and avoid local
rule is made to modify the quantity of pheromone to its visited
edges according to equation
τ (Oij , Ohl ) = (1 − ρ ) τ (Oij , Ohl ) + ρ τ0 . (5)
where τ0 is the initial pheromone level and ρ (0 ≤ ρ ≤ 1)
is the pheromone evaporating parameter.
• Global pheromone updating rule: the pheromone trail is
also updated at the end of each iteration. Only the best solution
is globally updating. The pheromone global updating rule is
defined as follow:
τ (Oij , Ohl ) = (1 − ρg ) τ (Oij , Ohl ) + ρg  τ (Oij , Ohl ) . (6)
where
1/Dgb , if (Oij , Ohl ) ∈ best solution
τ (Oij , Ohl ) =
0, otherwise
In the above equation, Dgb is the best total deviation of the
schedules and ρg (0 ≤ ρg ≤ 1) is the pheromone evaporating
parameter of the global updating rule. According to these equa-
tions, global updating rule is applied to intensify pheromone
levels on the edges belonging to the best tour.
V. E XPERIMENTAL DESIGN AND C OMPUTATIONAL
RESULTS
In this section, we present the results of a series of
computational experiments conducted to test the effectiveness
of the proposed approach. Henceforth, we call our algorithm
ACS-HFSET. For each combination of n = (25, 50, 100) and
S = (2, 5, 8, 10), we generate 10 random instances with the
following parameters uniformly distributed in the following
ranges:
• the number of machines mi ∈ [1, 5];
• the operation processing times pij ∈ [1, 100];
• the due date dj of each job j is determined by the equation
proposed in [10]:
S

dj = pij + u × (n − 1) × 50 . (7)
i=1
where u ∈ [0, 1]; According to [10], with this setting of
the job due dates about 50 % of the jobs would be tardy.
• the earliness weights hj ∈ [1, 5];
• the tardiness weights wj ∈ [1, 10];
In order to test these problems, we have to determine all the
parameters of our proposed ACS-HFSET algorithm. Indeed,
these parameters have a great impact in the quality of the
solution [18]. Some preliminary tests have been conducted to
find these parameters: q0 = 0.8, β = 3, ρ = 0.1, ρg = 0.1,
the number of ants is assumed to be equal to 20, and the
number of iterations is assumed to be equal to 500. The initial
pheromone level τ0 is set equal to 0.1 for all arcs connecting
two operations, except those connecting related operations to
the same machine. For these latter, we assume that the initial
1443
 TABLE I
C OMPUTATIONAL RESULTS .

Average percentage deviation

n S EDD * ODD* DD/BJ* TPTDD/BJ* ACS-HFSET CPU**

25 2 5.54 16.21 4.56 8.73 0 0.02

5 15.69 74.79 34.25 52.99 0 0.08
8 0.46 176.51 75.66 144.34 0 0.19
10 4.59 254.15 110.92 242.56 0 0.28
average 6.57 130.42 56.35 112.16 0 0.14
50 2 12.85 2.95 7.44 7.44 0 0.1
5 8.63 192.28 57.86 95.58 0 0.41
8 9.35 201.15 80.98 125.83 0 1.16
10 0 377.74 101.15 192.08 0 1.75
average 7.71 193.71 61.91 105.23 0 0.86
100 2 5.69 14.14 15.9 15.91 0 0.49
5 4.46 356.83 190.91 210.86 0 2.58
average 5.08 185,50 103,41 113,39 0 1,54

*The CPU for the constructive heuristics are less than 1 second.
** Average computation time per iteration for the ACS-HFSET algorithm in seconds.

pheromone level is equal to (5 × τ0 ). For each problem, 10
replicates are done and the best objective value of these 10
replications is kept.
We test both of the four constructive heuristics ( EDD,
ODD, DD/BJ, TPTDD/BJ ) and the ACS-HFSET meta-
heuristic performance by using the average percentage devi-
ation (APD):
 
D − Dbest
AP D = 100 × . (8)
Dbest
where D represents the sum of earliness and tardiness of jobs
given by one of the above constructive heuristics or the ASC-
HFSET meta-heuristic. Dbest is the best found solution.
The platform of our experiments is a personal computer
with a Pentium (R) 4, 2.93 GHz, and 1 Gb of RAM. Our
algorithms are coded in Java. According to the computational
results presented in Table 1, we can say that the ACS-HFSET
algorithm performs with respect to minimization of the sum
of earliness and tardiness of jobs, comparing to the four pro-
posed constructive heuristics. On the average, the constructive
heuristic based on the EDD rule is significantly best than the
other considered constructive heuristics.
The computation times (CPU) for the constructive heuristics
based on the proposed dispatching rules are less than 1 second.
Concerning the computation time spent for our ACS-HFSET
algorithm, we remarque that it is longer than the constructive
heuristics. However, we can note that Our proposed ACS-
HFSET approach provides solutions with reasonable time. We
can also observe the increasing of the CPU when the problem
size increases.
VI. C ONCLUSION
The increase of competitive has motivate the implementing
of JIT production on scheduling problem to reduce process in-
ventories and delivering goods at time. In fact, this production
environment is benefic to both manufacturers and customers.
The association of ET performance with the hybrid flow shop
scheduling problem represents a practical production model
used in real-life industries. The production goal is achieved by
minimizing the early and tardy costs and completing each job
as close to its due date.
In this work, we propose an adaptation of the ACS algo-
rithm to solve the HFS problem with ET penalties and distinct
deterministic job due dates. To compare our proposed algo-
rithm, we develop four constructive heuristics based on some
dispatching rules used in the literature for solving the flow shop
scheduling problem with ET penalties. Some large randomly
generated instances have been used to test the effectiveness of
our approach. The results presented in this paper show that
the proposed method outperforms the considered constructive
heuristics.
Due to the lack of research considering this type of problem,
further work needs to be focused on solving the proposed
problem with other meta-heuristics in order to compare them
with our proposed ACS-HFSET approach. The addition of local
search strategies to the ACS algorithm have been proven to be
very efficient. So, to improve the effectiveness of our proposed
method the hybridization with local search or an other meta-
heuristic could be an other direction for our works.
In this paper we have considered a bi-criteria HFS schedul-
ing problem. Our proposed ACS-HFSET approach has com-
bined the earliness and tardiness criteria into a weighted sum.
A promising future research issue could be to propose an ACO
algorithm to search for Pareto-optimal schedules of such a
problem.

1444 2008 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC 2008)
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