The migrating birds optimization metaheuristic for the permutation flow shop with sequence dependent setup times

This paper addresses the problem of scheduling a set of independent jobs with setup times on a set of machines in a permutation flow shop environment. A metaheuristic known as the Migrating Birds Optimization (MBO for short) is designed for the minimization of the overall completion time. A computational study is conducted to analyze the efficiency of this approach on instances that can be found in Sistemas de Optimizacion Aplicada(http://soa.iti.es/problem-instances).