An artificial bee colony based hyper-heuristic approach for inter-cell scheduling considering transportation capacity

The existence of inter-cell transfers has made the idea of creating completely independent cells impossible in cellular manufacturing systems (CMS). In this paper, an inter-cell scheduling problem with a transportation capacity constraint is analyzed in the context of the equipment manufacturing, which is essentially the coordination between intra-cell part production and inter-cell transportation. An artificial bee colony (ABC)-based hyper-heuristic with decision block (AHD) approach is proposed, in which a dynamic decision block strategy is used to adaptively group several decision-making points into one, namely decision block, and ABC is used for the selection of suitable rules for each decision block, respectively. A comparison between AHD and a heuristic-search genetic algorithm is conducted. The computational result has shown a better performance of the proposed method in minimizing total weighted tardiness.