Application of Firefly Algorithm and Its Parameter Setting for Job Shop Scheduling

Abstract Job shop scheduling problem (JSSP) is one of the most famous scheduling problems, most of which are categorised into Non-deterministic Polynomial (NP) hard problem. The objectives of this paper are to i) present the application of a recent developed metaheuristic called Firefly Algorithm (FA) for solving JSSP; ii) investigate the parameter setting of the proposed algorithm; and iii) compare the FA performance using various parameter settings. The computational experiment was designed and conducted using five benchmarking JSSP datasets from a classical OR-Library. The analysis of the experimental results on the FA performance comparison between with and without using optimised parameter settings was carried out. The FA with appropriate parameters setting that got from the experiment analysis produced the best-so-far schedule better than the FA without adopting parameter settings. Keywords : Scheduling, Job shop, Metaheuristics, Firefly Algorithm, Experimental design, Parameter setting (Selected from 1st Symposium on Hands-on Research and Development, Chiang Mai)