A Water Flow Algorithm for Flexible Flow Shop Scheduling with Limited Intermediate Buffers

In this paper, we propose a water flow algorithm for solving flexible flow shop scheduling problem with limited intermediate buffers, which is a NP-hard problem encountered in industry. The proposed algorithm is inspired by the hydrological cycle in meteorology and the erosion phenomenon in nature. In the algorithm, we combine the amount of precipitation and its falling force to form a flexible erosion capability, which helps the erosion process focus on exploiting promising regions strongly. We also integrate a seed position obtained by a constructive algorithm into the initial population to increase the performance of the algorithm. Some benchmark instances of the scheduling problem are used to evaluate our proposed algorithm. The computational results and comparisons demonstrate the efficacy of the algorithm. In addition, an industrial example is also introduced to illustrate the algorithm’s efficiency when solving practical problems.