Particle swarm optimization algorithm for permutation flowshop sequencing problem

Abstract

This paper presents a particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) to solve the permutation flowshop sequencing problem (PFSP) with makespan criterion. Simple but very efficient local search based on the variable neighborhood search (VNS) is embedded in the PSO algorithm to solve the benchmark suites in the literature. The results are presented and compared to the best known approaches in the literature. Ultimately, a total of 195 out of 800 best-known solutions in the literature is improved by the VNS version of the PSO algorithm.