Increasing the total net revenue for single machine order acceptance and scheduling problems using an artificial bee colony algorithm

Abstract

The order acceptance and scheduling (OAS) problem is an important topic for make-to-order production systems with limited production capacity and tight delivery requirements. This paper proposes a new algorithm based on Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) for solving the single machine OAS problem with release dates and sequence-dependent setup times. The performance of the proposed ABC-based algorithm was validated by a benchmark problem set of test instances with up to 100 orders. Experimental results showed that the proposed ABC-based algorithm outperformed three state-of-art metaheuristic-based algorithms from the literature. It is believed that this study successfully demonstrates a high-performance algorithm that can serve as a new benchmark approach for future research on the OAS problem addressed in this study.

Keywords:

• order acceptance and scheduling problem
• single machine
• artificial bee colony algorithm
• sequence-dependent setup times

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Professor Ceyda Oğuz for providing their benchmark problem set and solutions to us. We are also grateful to the anonymous referees for their useful and constructive comments and suggestions. This research was partially supported by the National Science Council of the Republic of China (Taiwan) under Contract nos. NSC 99-2410-H-182-023-MY2 and NSC 99-2628-E-027-003.