International Journal of Engineering and Technology

Due to the high complexity of Flexible Manufacturing Systems(FMS) scheduling problem, approaches that guarantee to find the optimal solution are feasible only for small size instance of the problems with lot of computational effort and time. In contrast, approaches based on meta heuristics are capable of finding good and “near to optimal” solutions to problem instances of realistic size, in a generally smaller computation time. This work provided a review on the use of swarm intelligence meta heuristics to the scheduling of flexible manufacturing problem. The two main areas of swarm intelligence that are prominently appeared in the literature relevant to this problems are ant colony optimization (ACO) and particle swarm optimization (PSO). By reviewing the literature related to use of swarm intelligence meta heuristics to FMS scheduling problem, and commented on the basis of the review