An effective VNSSA algorithm for the blocking flowshop scheduling problem with makespan minimization

This paper proposes a hybrid algorithm based on the variable neighborhood search (VNS) and the simulated annealing approach (SA) for minimizing the makespan in a blocking flowshop scheduling problem. The proposed hybrid algorithm (VNSSA) adopts simulated annealing approach (SA) as the local search method in the third stage of variable neighborhood search (VNS), and uses a perturbation mechanism consisting of various neighborhood operators to diversify the search. The destruction and construction phases of iterated greedy algorithm are used to generate a trial solution during the perturbation process of SA to further promote the search capability. To validate the performance of the proposed VNSSA algorithm, computational experiments and comparisons were conducted on the well-known benchmark problems of Taillard. The computational results of the proposed algorithm when evaluated against the state-of-art algorithms from the literature show good performance, some new best solutions for Taillard's instances are reported for this problem.