Comparison of cooling strategies in simulated annealing algorithms for flow-shop scheduling

Abstract

Flow-shop scheduling is considered. The order of operations must be the same for each job to minimize the maximum completion time. The Simulated Annealing algorithm is a standard approximate solution method in scheduling and optimization in general. Since the algorithm depends on cooling as a heuristic to generate better approx- imations, choosing the strategy with which the temperature decreases can affect the final result.