Particle swarm optimisation for open shop problems with fuzzy durations

Abstract

In this paper we confront a variation of the open shop problem where task durations are allowed to be uncertain and where uncertainty is modelled using fuzzy numbers. We propose a particle swarm optimization (PSO) approach to minimise the expected makespan using priorities to represent particle position, as well as a decoding algorithm to generate schedules in a subset of possibly active ones. Finally, the performance of the PSO is tested on several benchmark problems, modified so as to have fuzzy durations, compared with a memetic algorithm from the literature