A heuristic-based bee colony algorithm for the multiprocessor scheduling problem

Abstract

The multiprocessor scheduling is one of the NP-complete scheduling problems. This problem comes when a known parallel program must be executed on a parallel computer. Different methods and algorithms have been tested for this scheduling problem. This paper presents and tests a hybrid bee algorithm. In this approach, the bee algorithm is combined with a heuristic in order to produce quickly good solutions. The choosen heuristic is a greedy approach and hybridization is done using the indirect representation. The heuristic is a list heuristic and the bee algorithm has to find the best order for the ordered list of tasks used by the heuristic. Experimental results on different benchmarks will be presented and analized, as well as a comparison with other hybrid approaches. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.