Scheduling job shop with lot streaming and transportation through a modified artificial bee colony

Abstract

We consider lot streaming problem in a job shop with consistent sub-lots and transportation, in which each lot is regarded as an individual job to reduce management complexity. A modified artificial bee colony (MABC) algorithm is proposed to minimise makespan. An effective two-phase decoding procedure is applied, in which a schedule is first built and then transportation tasks are dispatched. A swap and an insertion are used in the employed bee phase and the onlooker bee phase respectively to produce new solutions. No scouts are considered and the worst solution is replaced with the elite solution every certain cycles to enhance the diversity of the swarm. The testing results and the comparisons of MABC with some methods show that MABC performs better than the chosen algorithms on the considered problem.

Keywords:

• lot streaming
• job shop scheduling
• artificial bee colony
• transportation

Acknowledgement

This paper is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (70901064).