Flexible job shop scheduling problems ( FJSP ) have received much attention from academia and industry for many years. Due to their exponential complexity, swarm intelligence ( SI ) and evolutionary algorithms ( EA ) are developed, employed and improved for solving them. More than 60% of the publications are related to SI and EA. This paper intents to give a comprehensive literature review of SI and EA for solving FJSP. First, the mathematical model of FJSP is presented and the constraints in applications are summarized. Then, the encoding and decoding strategies for connecting the problem and algorithms are reviewed. The strategies for initializing algorithms? population and local search operators for improving convergence performance are summarized. Next, one classical hybrid genetic algorithm ( GA ) and one newest imperialist competitive algorithm ( ICA ) with variables neighborhood search ( VNS ) for solving FJSP are presented. Finally, we summarize, discus and analyze the status of SI and EA for solving FJSP and give insight into future research directions.