Simulated annealing and imperialist competitive algorithm for minimising makespan in an open shop (Q2627412)

Summary: This paper presents an imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) and a simulated annealing (SA) algorithm in a non-preemptive open shop scheduling problem with job dependent setup times and sequence dependent transportation times to minimise the makespan (total completion time). The parameters of the algorithms are tuned by the response surface methodology (RSM). Based on classic approach, the scheduling problems are classified into small, medium and large sized problems. To evaluate the performance of the proposed ICA, its results are compared with the optimum ones obtained by GAMS for the small sized instances. Moreover, for the medium to large sized instances, the obtained solutions by the ICA are compared with the solutions of the effective method -- SA algorithm -- and the results are analysed.