Upper bounds on Taillard’s benchmark suite for the no-wait flowshop scheduling problem with makespan criterion

In this paper, the discrete particle swarm optimization (DPSO) algorithm is employed to solve the no-wait flowshop scheduling problem with the makespan criterion for Taillardpsilas benchmark suite [1]. As known, there exist 31 benchmark instances provided by Carlier [2], Heller [3], and Revees [4] for the makespan criterion. However, these benchmarks are relatively small in size and easy to be solved even by a simple descent algorithm. Since there is a lack of a sound benchmark suite for the no-wait flowshop scheduling problem with the makespan criterion, the DPSO algorithm presented by the authors [5] is applied to the 110 benchmark instances of Taillard by treating them as the no-wait flowshop problem instances with the makespan criterion. The DPSO algorithm is hybridized with the variable neighborhood descent (VND) algorithm to further improve the solution quality. Ultimately, we carried out extensive runs and provide the upper bounds for the future researchers to test their algorithms.