Apply the discrete artificial bee colony algorithm to the blocking flow shop problem with makespan criterion

This paper applies the discrete artificial bee colony (DABC) algorithm to the blocking flow shop (BFS) scheduling problem with makespan criterion. The DABC algorithm utilizes discrete job permutations to represent food sources and applies discrete operators to generate new food sources for the employed bees, onlookers and scouts. An initialization scheme based on the variant of MM heuristic is presented to construct an initial population with a certain level of quality and diversity. The DABC algorithm hybrids a local search based on the insert neighborhood to improve the algorithm´s local exploitation ability. The computational results demonstrate that the DABC algorithm is effective and efficient for the blocking flow shop scheduling problems with makespan criterion.