The impact of local search strategies on chaotic hybrid firefly particle swarm optimization algorithm in flow-shop scheduling

A flow-shop production environment is a widely used production setting in the industry, especially pre-ferred when the variety of products and processes is limited. The constant development of technology and the increasing competition in the market compel researchers to seek ways to increase efficiency. Therefore, scheduling remains an important area of study for researchers. When the size of the problem increases, particularly in real-life contexts, it becomes almost impossible to work out a feasible solution to scheduling problems through current computer technologies. In such cases, solutions are often devel-oped using heuristic or meta-heuristic methods. However, the performance of these methods may vary according to the problem or the components of the suggested method of solution.This study aimed to investigate the effect of local search strategies on the solution performance of hybrid firefly and particle swarm optimization algorithm, developed using chaotic local search. We used four different solution methods: the triple local search strategy consisting of insertion, swap and inver-sion, which were used frequently in earlier studies, and the individual use of each of these three strate-gies. In this study, the average relative difference values calculated using insertion, swap, inversion and triple strategy were found to be 3.03, 1.27, 2.54 and 1.20, respectively. As a result of the analyses carried out to compare the results of the solutions obtained in the flow-shop scheduling problems of Taillard, it was found that better results were obtained using the triple strategy. These findings can be a point of ref-erence for future research.(c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).