Improving the migrating birds optimization metaheuristic for the permutation flow shop with sequence-dependent set-up times.

This paper addresses the problem of scheduling a set of independent jobs with set-up times on a set of machines in a permutation flow shop environment. A metaheuristic known as the Migrating Birds Optimization (MBO) is adapted for the minimization of the makespan. Two versions of the algorithm are presented. The first is a basic MBO and the second introduces additional features. An extensive computational study is conducted to analyse the efficiency of the two methods on a benchmark of instances that can be found in Sistemas de Optimizacion Aplicada (http://soa.iti.es/problem-instances). The second version outperforms by far the first one. Moreover, the results that are produced by the latter show that it is suitable for solving real-world scheduling problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]