New high performing hybrid particle swarm optimization for permutation flow shop scheduling problem with minimization of makespan

The well-known particle swarm optimization (PSO) proposed by Kennedy and Eberhart has been widely applied to the continuous optimal problems. However, it is still intractable to apply PSO to discrete optimization problems, such as permutation flow shop scheduling problems (PFSSP). In this paper, a new high performing metaheuristic algorithm hybridizing PSO with variable neighborhood search (VNS) is proposed to solve PFSSP with the objective of minimizing makespan. NEH heuristic has been adopted in the first step to generate good solutions in the initial population, and then PSO and VNS are hybridized to search for optimal or near-optimal solutions of the PFSSP. Two effective neighborhood structures concerned with characteristics of PFSSP have been adopted to enhance VNS's performance. Computational experiments have been conducted on benchmarks and comparison results with other existing algorithms show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.