Permutation flow shop scheduling problem deals with the production planning of a number of jobs processed by a set of machines in the same order. Several metaheuristics have been proposed for minimizing the makespan of this problem. Taking as basis the previous Alternate Two-Phase PSO (ATPPSO) method and the neighborhood concepts of the Cellular PSO algorithm proposed for continuous problems, this paper proposes the improvement of ATPPSO with a simple adaptive local search strategy (called CAPSO-SALS) to enhance its performance. CAPSO-SALS keeps the simplicity of ATPPSO and boosts the local search based on a neighborhood for every solution. Neighbors are produced by interchanges or insertions of jobs which are selected by a linear roulette scheme depending of the makespan of the best personal positions. The performance of CAPSO-SALS is evaluated using the 12 different sets of Taillard’s benchmark problems and then is contrasted with the original and another previous enhancement of the ATPPSO algorithm. Finally, CAPSO-SALS is compared as well with other ten classic and state-of-art metaheuristics, obtaining satisfactory results.