Scheduling jobs on flowshop environment applying simulated annealing algorithm

Simulated Annealing (SA) heuristics have been successfully applied on a variety of complex optimisation problems. This paper investigates the effect of different neighbourhood scheme on the SA process through computational experiments on the permutation flowshop scheduling problem with makespan criterion and proposes an improved SA procedure with a neighbourhood scheme. The test problems are selected from the OR-library and experiment results show the comparative performances of SA with different neighbourhood schemes and that the proposed SA with a neighbourhood scheme always gives good performance.