You are entitled to access the full text of this document A novel hybrid algorithm of cooperative variable neighborhood search and constraint programming for flexible job shop scheduling problem with sequence dependent setup time

This study focuses on the flexible job shop scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times (FJSP-SDST), and the goal is minimizing the makespan. To solve FJSP-SDST, first, we develop a constraint programming (CP) model to obtain optimal solutions. Due to the NP-hardness of FJSP-SDST, a CP assisted meta-heuristic algorithm (C-VNS-CP) is designed to make use of the advantages of both CP model and cooperative variable neighborhood search (C-VNS). The C-VNS-CP algorithm consists of two stages. The first stage involves C-VNS, for which eight neighborhood structures are defined. In the second stage, CP is used to further optimize the good solution obtained from C-VNS. In order to prove the efficiency of the C-VNS algorithm, CP model, and C-VNS-CP algorithm, experiments of 20 instances are conducted.