A Particle Swarm Optimization for scheduling a fixed product open shop

Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) has been gaining attention in the literature due to the flexibility of the algorithm and its applicability to flow-shops, job-shops and vehicle routing problems, to name a few. In this work a PSO algorithm is utilized to solve a fixed product flexible open shop scheduling problem with transportation considerations, where K workers need to perform H tasks at each of J locations. Therefore the objective of the PSO algorithm is to assign the workers to tasks, while simultaneously routing the workers in a manner that minimizes the makespan. The algorithm must take into account the fact that traveling distances may be nontrivial and workers can be heterogeneous.