Being inspired by the breeding behavior such as brood parasitism of cuckoos,the cuckoo search(CS) was proposed as a novel bionic swarm intelligence optimization method.The optimization mechanism and characteristics of CS were analyzed.Then,the proposed search strategy was applied to solve the minimization of makespan for the problem of permutation flow shop scheduling,adopting the code rule of randomized key representation based on the smallest position value.Comparing with the firefly algorithm and particle swarm optimization,simulation results of benchmark instances validate the efficiency and superiority of CS.