An Ant Approach to the Flow Shop Problem

In this article we present an Ant Colony Optimization approach to the Flow Shop Problem. ACO is a new algorithmic approach, inspired by the foraging behavior of real ants, that can be applied to the solution of combinatorial optimization problems. Artificial ants are used to construct solutions for Flow Shop Problems that subsequently are improved by a local search procedure. Comparisons with other heuristics for the Flow Shop Scheduling problem show that with our approach very promising results are obtained.