Permutation codes (or permutation arrays) have received considerable interest in recent years, partly motivated by a potential application to powerline communication. Powerline communication is the transmission of data over the electricity distribution system. This environment is rather hostile to communication and the requirements are such that permutation codes may be suitable. The problem addressed in this study is the construction of permutation codes with a specified length and minimum Hamming distance, and with as many codewords (permutations) as possible. A number of techniques are used including construction by automorphism group and several variations of clique search based on vertex degrees. Many significant improvements are obtained to the size of the best known code
