A hybrid particle swarm optimization algorithm for the permutation flowshop scheduling problem

Summarization: This paper introduces a new hybrid algorithmic nature inspired approach based on Particle Swarm Optimization, for successfully solving one of the most computationally complex problems, the Permutation Flowshop Scheduling Problem. The Permutation Flowshop Scheduling Problem (PFSP) belongs to the class of combinatorial optimization problems characterized as NP-hard and, thus, heuristic and metaheuristic techniques have been used in order to find high quality solutions in reasonable computational time. The proposed algorithm for the solution of the PFSP, the Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization (HybPSO), combines a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) Algorithm, the Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) Strategy and a Path Relinking (PR) Strategy. In order to test the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed method we use a set of benchmark instances of different sizes.Παρουσιάστηκε στο: 13th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimizatio