MODIFIED SIMULATED ANNEALING ALGORITHMS FOR THE FLOW-SHOP SEQUENCING PROBLEM

In this paper, two simulated annealing algorithms with a modified gene ration mechanism are proposed and applied to the m-machine and n-job f low shop sequencing problem with the objective of minimizing the makes pan. The generation mechanism is modified in order to obtain robust pe rformance with respect to the choice of a cooling schedule. By compute r simulations on randomly generated test problems, it is shown that th e performance of the proposed algorithms is less sensitive to the choi ce of a cooling schedule than that of the standard simulated annealing algorithm. The proposed algorithms are also compared with other heuri stics such as two multi-start descent algorithms, two taboo search alg orithms and a random sampling technique.