A new approach for permutation flow-shop scheduling problem using league championship algorithm

This paper presents a new algorithm, called league championship algorithm (LCA), for scheduling context. We consider the scheduling in a permutation flowshop system with makespan criterion. LCA is one of the latest algorithms introduced for optimization which tries to metaphorically model a league championship environment wherein artificial teams play in an artificial league for several weeks (iterations). Given the league schedule, a number of individuals, as sport teams, play in pairs and their game outcome is determined given known the playing strength (fitness value) along with the team formation (solution). Modelling an artificial match analysis, each team devises the required changes in its formation (a new solution) for the next week contest and the championship goes for a number of seasons. LCA works for continuous optimization and should be modified to work for discrete scheduling problems. For this sake, we allow LCA searches within the continuous space, but do evaluations in a discrete space via a heuristic rule to make a bridge between the continuous and discrete spaces. Results of LCA applied to well known benchmark suites are presented and compared to the well known approaches such as genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization and differential evolution algorithms. On the adopted benchmark suite, LCA is able to beat all these rivals.