A Multi-objective Simulated Annealing Algorithm for Solving the Flexible no-wait Flowshop Scheduling Problem with Transportation Times

This paper deals with a bi-objective hybrid no-wait flowshop scheduling problem minimizing the make span and total weighted tardiness, in which we consider transportation times between stages. obtaining an optimal solution for this type of complex, large-sized problem in a reasonable computational time by using traditional approaches and optimization tools is extremely difficult. this paper, therefore, presents a new multi-objective simulated annealing algorithm (mosa). a set of experimental instances are carried out to evaluate the algorithm by advanced multi-objective performance measures. in fact, the performance of the algorithm is carefully evaluated in terms of the available algorithms by means of multi-objective performance measures and statistical tools. the results show that compared with other algorithms, a variant of our proposed mosa produces a good performance.