A Hybrid ILS-VND Based Hyper-heuristic for Permutation Flowshop Scheduling Problem

In this paper an iterated local search (ILS) is embedded with a variable neighborhood Descent (VND) hyper-heuristic. The proposed hyper-heuristic combines low-level heuristics. Several variants from the literature within the proposed ILS were implemented and tested. This article conducts an empirical study involving hard combinatorial optimization problems, permutation flowshop scheduling problem (PFSP) with the objectives of minimizing makespan and the total flowtime of jobs. The proposed ILS based hyper-heuristic proved its general and applicable across the studied problems.