An effective artificial bee colony algorithm for the flexible job-shop scheduling problem

An effective artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is proposed in this paper for solving the flexible job-shop scheduling problem with the criterion to minimize the maximum completion time (makespan). The ABC algorithm stresses the balance between global exploration and local exploitation. First, multiple strategies are utilized in a combination to generate the initial solutions with certain quality and diversity as the food sources. Second, crossover and mutation operators are well designed for machine assignment and operation sequence to generate the new neighbor food sources for the employed bees. Third, a local search strategy based on critical path is proposed and embedded in the searching framework to enhance the local intensification capability for the onlooker bees. Meanwhile, an updating mechanism of population by generating the scout bees with the initialing strategy is proposed to enrich the searching behavior and avoid the premature convergence of the algorithm. In addition, a well-designed left-shift decoding scheme is employed to transform a solution to an active schedule. Numerical simulation results based on well-known benchmarks and comparisons with some existing algorithms demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed ABC algorithm.