Title: A hybrid artificial bee colony based on differential evolution for production scheduling problems

Authors: Hui Wang; Wenjun Wang; Jia Zhao; Huasheng Zhu; 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 ' School of Information Engineering, Nanchang Institute of Technology, Nanchang 330099, China ' School of Information Engineering, Nanchang Institute of Technology, Nanchang 330099, China

Abstract: Artificial bee colony (ABC) is a new optimisation technique, which has been successfully applied to various optimisation problems. In this paper, we propose a new ABC algorithm called ABCDE, which utilises the differential evolution (DE) scheme. It is known that both employed and onlooker bees in ABC use the same solution search strategy to generate new candidate solutions. In our new approach ABCDE, the employed bees still use the original solution search strategy, while the onlooker bees employ the DE scheme. Experimental studies are conducted on a set of recently proposed CEC 2014 benchmark functions. Computational results show the good search abilities of ABCDE. To further verify the performance of ABCDE on discrete optimisation problems, we apply ABCDE to solve production scheduling problems. Simulation results demonstrate that our approach can achieve promising solutions.

Keywords: artificial bee colony; hybrid ABC; differential evolution; production scheduling; discrete optimisation; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICA.2014.066487

International Journal of Innovative Computing and Applications, 2014 Vol.6 No.2, pp.55 - 62

Received: 04 Jul 2014
Accepted: 10 Jul 2014

Published online: 31 Dec 2014 *

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