An Artificial Bee Colony with Diversified Operators for Energy-Efficient Hybrid Flow Shop Scheduling with Batch Processing Machines

In this study, energy-efficient hybrid flow shop scheduling problem (EHFSP) with BPM at a middle stage is investigated, which exists in many real-life manufacturing processes such as casting, an artificial bee colony with diversified operators (DOABC) is presented to minimize makespan and total energy consumption. Four global search operators and three neighborhood search operators are applied and a dynamical way is used to dynamically decide search operator for each solution. The whole population is divided in some groups and reward and communication are conducted for groups. Four methods are adopted to select food source and an adaptive onlooker bee phase is implemented. The computational results demonstrate that the diversified operators are effective and DOABC has promising advantages on solving EHFSP with BPM.