An iterated local search algorithm for the permutation flowshop problem with total flowtime criterion

An ILS algorithm is proposed to solve the permutation flowshop sequencing problem with total flowtime criterion. The effects of different initial permutations and different perturbation strengths are studied. Comparisons are carried out with three constructive heuristics, three ant-colony algorithms and a particle swarm optimization algorithm. Experiments on benchmarks and a set of random instances show that the proposed algorithm is more effective. The presented ILS improves the best known permutations by a significant margin.