A tabu search heuristic with variable neighborhood for flow shop scheduling problem with limited buffer storage

This paper explored NP-hard flow shop scheduling problem with limited buffer storage. A tabu search heuristic with variable neighborhood was proposed. An initial seed solution was created by NEH heuristic. Then a restart mechanism was proposed to escape from it after been traped into local optimal. The performance of the algorithm is tested on Rec, hel1 and hel2 benchmark problems. The results are compared to the well-known NEH heuristic to indicate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.