Abstract:
Scheduling processes deal with the rank ordering and allocation of jobs at different resources and/or locations available in a manufacturing shop. The conventional researchers associated with shop scheduling gave thrust on the optimization of one or many of the performance measures available in literature. The complexity of the problem depends on the number of jobs and machines involved in each case. The recent advances in the arena reveal application of meta-heuristics in scheduling to be relatively more efficient in many cases than regular conventional techniques.

This study intends to discuss the application of Simulated annealing as applied to flow shop scheduling optimization. The influence of the algorithm parameters and operators are initially surveyed in detail. The flow shop instances considered for the study are open static flow shops to cover a larger number of candidate schedules in the search-space, due to the inherent levels complexity and variety with which machines process the jobs.

Keywords: Scheduling, Meta heuristics, Simulated Annealing