What is NP-Hard Problems

A multistage hybrid flow shop scheduling problem is considered in this chapper with the objective of minimizing the makespan and mean flow time. Since the problem is NP-hard in nature, many heuristics and meta-heuristics were developed by the researchers. cuckoo search algorithm is one of the recently developed meta–heuristic algorithms inspired by the social behavior of cuckoos. The cuckoo search algorithm is presented in this paper to solve the hybrid flow shop scheduling problems. To illustrate the proposed algorithm, data sets from a steel furniture manufacturing company are used. The computational results show that the proposed algorithm is better than many other algorithms.