A competitive and cooperative Migrating Birds Optimization algorithm for vary-sized batch splitting scheduling problem of flexible Job-Shop with setup time

Batch production has been widely used in mass-producing manufacturing where batch splitting techniques can be applied to improve the production efficiency. Therefore the Batch Splitting Scheduling Problem of Flexible Job-Shop arises, which is a complicated problem with complex constraints and structure. In this paper, the Migrating Birds Optimization algorithm is improved so that it can be applied to the problem and a Competitive and Cooperative Migrating Birds Optimization algorithm is proposed, which consists of three main stages. The improved V-shaped flying stage can avoid the neighborhood of the follower birds being wholly abandoned and prevent premature convergence. The adjustment stage can diversify the formation of the bird population and mitigate the loss of population diversity. The competition stage can improve the searching efficiency of the population. Through experiments on several test cases, the effectiveness of the three proposed stages is confirmed, and the proposed algorithm is proven to effectively decrease the makespan of Batch Splitting Scheduling Problem of Flexible Job-Shop.