Title: Multi-strategy ensemble artificial bee colony algorithm for large-scale production scheduling problem

Authors: Hui Wang; Wenjun Wang; Hui Sun

Addresses: School of Information Engineering, Nanchang Institute of Technology, Nanchang 330099, China ' School of Business Administration, Nanchang Institute of Technology, Nanchang 330099, China ' School of Information Engineering, Nanchang Institute of Technology, Nanchang 330099, China

Abstract: This paper presents a multi-strategy ensemble artificial bee colony (MEABC) algorithm for solving large-scale production scheduling problem. MEABC is a new variant of artificial bee colony (ABC), which has shown good performance on many continuous optimisation problems. To apply MEABC to discrete production scheduling problem, the smallest position value (SPV) rule is employed. Moreover, a modified NEH-based population initialisation method is utilised for generating high-quality initial solutions. Experimental study is conducted on a set of 140 flow shop scheduling problems with the size from 20 × 5 to 2,000 × 100. Simulation results show that MEABC performs better than the NEH and ABC on all test instances.

Keywords: artificial bee colony; ABC; production scheduling; flow shop scheduling; discrete optimisation; multi-strategy ensemble; large-scale scheduling; smallest position value; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICA.2015.072981

International Journal of Innovative Computing and Applications, 2015 Vol.6 No.3/4, pp.128 - 136

Received: 25 Nov 2014
Accepted: 21 Mar 2015
Published online: 11 Nov 2015 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article