The new golf neighborhood for the flexible job shop problem

In this paper we propose a new neighborhood for the flexible job shop problem. A main idea of the proposed neighborhood is to execute a 'long shot' of an operation from the current operation's machine to another machine of the same type, and then to the make a small move by using a local optimization algorithm without changing operations-to-machines assignment. We call this method 'the golf neighborhood'. Computational experiments executed on the benchmark instances from the literature show the efficiency of this solution.