Minimizing Total Flow Time in a Flow Shop with Blocking Using a Hybrid Variable Neighborhood Search and Simulated Annealing Algorithm

In this paper, a hybrid methodology that incorporates a simulated annealing (SA) approach into the framework of variable neighborhood search (VNS) is proposed to solve the blocking flow shop scheduling problem with the total flow time minimization. The proposed hybrid algorithm adopts SA as the local search method in the third stage of VNS, and uses a perturbation mechanism consisting of three neighborhood operators in VNS to diversify the search. To enhance the intensification search, best-insert operator is adopted to generate the neighbors in SA. To evaluate the performance of the proposed hybrid algorithm, computational experiments and comparisons were conducted on the well-known Taillard’s benchmark problems. The computational results and comparisons validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.