International Journal of Engineering and Technology

This paper presents comparative analysis of metaheuristic algorithms for m-machine No wait flow shop scheduling (NWFSS) for finding optimal scheduling sequence considering minimization of total flow time (TFT). Such type of analysis for NWFSS is not available in the literature published till date. Because of combinatorial optimization behavior, NWFSS is NP Hard problem. In order to find the approximate solution, population based technique, evolutionary technique and population based evolutionary technique are implemented by considering stochastic input. The computational experimentations show that, PSO finds better solution compared with other techniques but the quality of solution can be improved by hybridizing PSO with guided random search technique.