Pareto archived simulated annealing for permutation flow shop scheduling with multiple objectives

In this paper, a metaheuristic procedure based on simulated annealing (SA) is proposed to find Pareto-optimal or non-dominated solution set for the permutation flow shop scheduling problems (FSPs) with the consideration of regular performance measures of minimizing the makespan and the total flow time of jobs. A new perturbation mechanism called "segment-random insertion (SRI)" scheme is used to generate the neighbourhood of a given sequence. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by solving benchmark FSP instances provided by (B. Taillard, 1993). The results obtained are evaluated in terms of the number of non-dominated schedules generated by the algorithm and the proximity of the obtained non-dominated front to the Pareto front. The results and simple quality measures suggested in this paper can be used to evaluate the quality of the non-dominated fronts obtained by different algorithms