Applying bee colony optimization heuristic for production scheduling in make-pack manufacturing

This paper presents the application of Bee Colony Optimization (BCO) for solving make-pack problem. The objective is to reduce the makespan while satisfying the restrictions on the number and capacity of production resources, resource usage and production time for each production, product change over and the production transfer. BCO is applied to solve make-pack problem with four productions resources; premix tank, mix tank, storage tank and packing line. Small and realistic-sized case studies are conducted with BCO. Small case study contains two bulk formulas and 10 final products. The results show that BCO can find the same minimum makespan (1,447.56 minutes) in every trial. The average run time is 5.91 seconds. For the realistic-sized case study with 59 bulk formulas and 203 final products, the results show that the minimum makespan in every trial is slightly different. The mean deviation from the minimum solution (7,283 minutes) is only 0.5% with average run time of 1078.1seconds.