An improved discrete artificial bee colony algorithm for the distributed permutation flowshop scheduling problem with preventive maintenance

The distributed permutation flowshop scheduling problem with preventive maintenance operator (PM/DPFSP) is closely related to modem industry. This paper presents an improved discrete artificial bee colony (IDABC) algorithm for solving this problem. The criterion to be optimized is the makespan. An improved NEH heuristic method is proposed to initialize the population effectively. We adapted a local search method with insertion and swap operator to produce neighboring solutions in employ bee phase and onlooker bee phase. A global search method with destruction and reconstruction phase is introduced to avoid local optima in scout bee phase. The parameters for the proposed IDABC are calibrated by means of a design of experiments and analysis of variance. We conduct extensive experiments to test the performance of IDABC. Computational results indicate that IDABC has promising advantages on PM/DPFSP.