In this work, the performance of cuckoo search algorithm (CSA) is measured solving the multistage hybrid flow shop (HFS) scheduling problems with parallel machines. The objective is the minimization of makespan. The HFS scheduling problems are proved to be strongly non-deterministic polynomial time-hard (NP-hard). Proposed CSA algorithm has been tested on benchmark problems addressed in the literature against other well-known algorithms. The results are presented in terms of percentage

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... (PD) of the solution from the lower bound. The results indicate that the proposed CSA algorithm is quite effective in reducing makespan because average PD is observed as 1.531, whereas the next best algorithm has result of average PD of 2.295 which is in general nearly 50% worse and other algorithms start from 3.833.