A Dynamic Multi-swarm Particle Swarm Optimizer for blocking flow shop scheduling

This paper presents a Dynamic Multi-Swarm Particle Swarm Optimizer (DMS-PSO) for solving blocking flow shop scheduling problems with makespan criterion. Using small swarms and a regrouping schedule, DMS-PSO has a better global search ability. In order to improve its local search ability, a special designed local search phase is added into the algorithm. The experimental results indicate that the proposed DMS-PSO has a better performance on the blocking flow shop scheduling problems comparing some other algorithms.