This paper investigates the problem of selecting and scheduling a set of projects among available projects. Each project consists of several tasks and to perform each one some resource is required. The objective is to maximize total benefit. The paper constructs a mathematical formulation in form of mixed integer linear programming model. Three effective metaheuristics in form of the imperialist competitive algorithm, simulated annealing and genetic algorithm are developed to solve such a hard problem. The proposed algorithms employ advanced operators. The performance of the proposed algorithms is numerically evaluated. The results show the high performance of the imperialist competitive algorithm outperforms the other algorithms. Manuscript profile

This paper studies the hybrid flow shop scheduling where the optimization criterion is the minimization of total tardiness. First, theproblem is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming model. Then, to solve large problem sizes, an artificial immune algorithmhybridized with a simple local search in form of simulated annealing is proposed. Two experiments are carried out to evaluate the modeland the algorithm. In the first one, the general performance of the model and the proposed algorithm is experimented. In the next one, thepresented algorithm is compared against some other algorithms. The results support high performance of the proposed algorithm. Manuscript profile

This paper deals with a bi-objective hybrid no-wait flowshop scheduling problem minimizing the makespan and total weighted tardiness, in which we consider transportation times between stages. Obtaining an optimal solution for this type of complex, large-sized problem in reasonable computational time by using traditional approaches and optimization tools is extremely difficult. This paper presents a new multi-objective simulated annealing algorithm (MOSA). A set of experimental instances are carried out to evaluate the algorithm by advanced multi-objective performance measures. The algorithm is carefully evaluated for its performance against available algorithm by means of multi-objective performance measures and statistical tools. The related results show that a variant of our proposed MOSA provides sound performance comparing with other algorithms. Manuscript profile

Although lot streaming scheduling is an active research field, lot streaming flexible flow lines problems have received far less attention than classical flow shops. This paper deals with scheduling jobs in lot streaming flexible flow line problems. The paper mathematically formulates the problem by a mixed integer linear programming model. This model solves small instances to optimality. Moreover, a novel artificial bee colony optimization is developed. This algorithm utilizes five effective mechanisms to solve the problem. To evaluate the algorithm, it is compared with adaptation of four available algorithms. The statistical analyses showed that the proposed algorithm significantly outperformed the other tested algorithms. Manuscript profile