Minimizing total flow time in permutation flow shop scheduling with improved simulated annealing

For the past two decades simulated annealing has been playing a crucial role in the design of optimization strategies for flow shop scheduling applications. This paper presents an efficient simulated annealing algorithm for minimizing the total flow time in permutation flow shop scheduling problems. Empirical results demonstrate the improvement in solution quality obtained by the proposed approach over state-of-the-art methods in the literature.