A swarm intelligence approach to flexible job-shop scheduling problem with no-wait constraint in remanufacturing

Abstract

This paper addresses a flexible job-shop scheduling problem with no-wait constraint (FJSPNW) which combines features of two well-known combinatorial optimization problems - flexible job-shop scheduling problem and no-wait job-shop scheduling problem. To solve FJSPNW with the objective of minimizing the makespan, an artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is proposed. This problem finds application in remanufacturing scheduling systems. ABC algorithm is a recently developed swarm intelligence technique based on intelligent foraging behavior of honey bee swarm. Since its inception, it has shown promising performance for the solution of numerous hard optimization problems. Numerical experiments have been performed on a set of standard benchmark instances in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of ABC algorithm. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.