Dynamic opposite learning enhanced dragonfly algorithm for solving large-scale flexible job shop scheduling problem

Flexible job shop scheduling problem (FJSP) has attracted many research interests, in particular for meta-heuristic algorithm (MA) developers due to the superior optimization performance. Dragonfly algorithm (DA) is one of recent and popular MA approaches. However, it is inevitable for DA to be trapped into local optima, especially when dealing with the complex large-scale flexible job shop scheduling problem (LSFJSP). In this paper, an improved DA, adopting a dynamic opposite learning (DOL) strategy, is proposed (namely DOLDA) to solve the LSFJSP. DOL strategy is embedded into the population initialization stage and the generation jumping stage to raise the search ability of DA. This paper uses a T-test to testify whether there are differences between the proposed algorithm and other comparison algorithms, comparison results indicate that DOLDA shows noticeable differences with other algorithms that explain the effectiveness and innovation of the proposed algorithm. The jump rate is an important parameter that determines the probability of algorithms escaping from the algorithms’ local optimal solution. This paper also considers the jump rate analysis experiments to maximize the power of the DOLDA. 28 test functions from CEC 2013 and CEC 2014 are applied to verify the performance of DOLDA, test results reveal that DOLDA owns strong search ability in coping with almost all test functions. The DOLDA also is applied to solve 15 LSFJSP instances generated by Brandimate rule, the results obtained show that DOLDA can efficiently achieve a better solution on the LSFJSP compare to compared algorithms.