Flow Shop Scheduling by Simulated Annealing

Abstract

In this paper, we apply the simulated annealing algorithm to the flow shop scheduling problem with an objective of minimizing the makespan and show its power as an approximate algorithm by the numerical experiment on randomly generated test problems. In the numerical experiment, we compare the simulated annealing algorithm with the other approximate algorithms including the RAES algorithm proposed by Dannenbring, its slightly modified algorithm, a random search algorithm and a local search algorithm. We also show that the performance of the simulated annealing algorithm depends on the choice of a neighborhood structure.