Path-based Metaheuristics to Solve A Variant of the Flowshop Problem

Abstract

The hybrid flexible flowshop problem with sequence dependent setup times is a problem found in many industrial environments. We propose trajectory-based metaheuristic algorithms to solve this problem. The first two proposals are simulated annealing using different movement operators: insertion and exchange. The third and last proposal modifies an iterated local search algorithm proposed in the literature by changing the insertion operator for the exchange one. Numerical experiments compare the performance of the different proposals using a comprehensive benchmark from the literature. The results show that algorithmic approaches applying the exchange operator are more efficient than the ones using the insertion operator to solve the variant of the flowshop problem