A novel Variable Neighborhood Particle Swarm Optimization for multi-objective Flexible Job-Shop Scheduling Problems

This paper introduces a hybrid metaheuristic, the Variable Neighborhood Particle Swarm Optimization (VNPSO), consisting of a combination of the Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The proposed VNPSO method is used for solving the multi-objective Flexible Job-shop Scheduling Problems (FJSP). The details of implementation for the multi-objective FJSP and the corresponding computational experiments are reported. The results indicate that the proposed algorithm is an efficient approach for the multi-objective FJSP, especially for large scale problems.