Automatic Design Of Heuristics For Minimizing The Makespan In Permutation Flow Shops

The automatic design of heuristic search methods has been applied successfully to many optimization problems. In this paper we study the application of automatic algorithm configuration to the permutation flow shop scheduling problem with makespan minimization. Our approach consists in using a grammar to determine how to combine individual algorithmic components into an iterated local search, coupled with a parametric representation for the instantiations of such a grammar. To explore the algorithmic search space we employ a procedure based on racing. The obtained algorithms are evaluated on two well-known benchmarks and compared to state-of-the-art heuristics.