A Variable Neighborhood Migrating Birds Optimization Algorithm for Flexible Job Shop Scheduling

A hybrid meta-heuristic named variable neighborhood migrating birds optimization (VNMBO), which is a combination of variable neighborhood search (VNS) and migrating birds optimization (MBO). The main aim of this paper is to provide a new way for MBO to solve the flexible job shop scheduling problem (FJSP). A two-stage population initialization scheme was first adopted to improve the quality of the initial solutions. An individual leaping mechanism was introduced to the algorithm in order to avoid the premature convergence. To search the solution space effectively, three neighborhood structures were designed and a VNS was developed to enhance the local searching ability. Finally, to assess the performance of the proposed VNMBO, some published algorithms were compared by using two famous benchmark data sets. The comparison results show that the proposed VNMBO is effective for solving the FJSP with the objective of minimizing the makespan.