An adaptive artificial bee colony for hybrid flow shop scheduling with batch processing machines in casting process

Hybrid flow shop scheduling problem (HFSP) with real-life constraints has been extensively considered; however, HFSP with batch processing machines (BPM) at a middle stage is seldom investigated. In this study, HFSP with BPM at a middle stage in hot & cold casting process is considered and an adaptive artificial bee colony (AABC) is proposed to minimise makespan. To produce high quality solutions, an adaptive search process with employed bee phase and adaptive search step is implemented. Adaptive search step, which may be onlooker bee phase or cooperation or empty, is decided by evolution quality and an adaptive threshold. Cooperation is performed between the improved solutions of one employed bee swarm and the unimproved solutions of another swarm. Six search operators are constructed and search operator is adaptively adjusted. A new scout phase is also given. A lower bound is provided and proved. Extensive experiments are conducted. The computational results validate that new strategies such as cooperation are effective and efficient and AABC can obtain better results than methods from existing literature on the considered problem.