An improved artificial bee colony for distributed assembly flow shop scheduling

Distributed assembly flow shop scheduling problem (DAFSP) with
$m$
dedicated parallel machine and a single assembly machine in each factory is considered. An improved artificial bee colony (IABC) is proposed to minimize makespan. Bi-directional communication is performed between employed bees and onlooker bees based on search efficiency and the differentiated search processes are adopted in these two groups of bees in IABC. Food source of onlooker bee is also updated in a dynamic way. Many experiments are conducted and IABC is compared with other methods from the literature. The computational results show that IABC has promising advantages on solving the considered problem.