A Discrete Artificial Bee Colony for Distributed Permutation Flowshop Scheduling Problem with Total Flow Time Minimization

The distributed permutation flowshop scheduling problem (DPFSP) has important applications in modern industries. This paper presents a discrete artificial bee colony (DABC) algorithm for solving the DPFSP with total flow time criterion. We use the job permutation based representation to represent the candidate solutions. The insertion operator is adapted to generate neighboring solutions in the search process. We re-design the search phases including employ bees, onlooker bees, and scout bees according to the problem-specific knowledge. A comprehensive computational campaign based on the 720 benchmark instances demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed DABC algorithm for solving the DPFSP with the total flowtime criterion.