A Discrete Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm for the Permutation Flowshop Scheduling Problem with Sequence-Dependent Setup Times

Abstract

A discrete artificial bee colony ( DABC) algorithm for the permutation flowshop scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times (PFSP-SDST) is presented in this paper. PFSP-SDST is an important problem that has practical applications in production facilities. The proposed DABC algorithm uses destruction and construction procedure to generate neighboring food sources. In addition a local search algorithm with insert and swap neighborhoods is used to enhance the solution quality. The main contribution of this work is providing a speedup algorithm for the swap neighborhood. Computational experiments are carried out to test the performance of the algorithm on a benchmark problem set from the literature. Experimental results show that the proposed DABC algorithm utilizing swap neighborhood is very competitive to the best performing algorithms from the literature.