Solving the Job Scheduling Problem in Open Shop Using Bat Algorithm

An optimal scheduling reduces the completion time (makespan) of jobs, and finally increase profits in today's competitive environment. Open shop scheduling problem (OSSP) involves a set of activities that should be performed on a limited set of machines. The aim of scheduling in an open shop is to provide a schedule for the execution of the entire operation so that the completion time of all operations is reduced. OSSP has a large solution space and belongs to NP-hard problems. So far, various algorithms are developed for OSSP. In this paper we propose a new optimization algorithm named Bat Algorithm (BA) for solving OSSP which has a relative advantage over other algorithms. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has high performance and increases the reliability and efficiency of the system.