A Reinforcing-Learning-Driven Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm for Scheduling Jobs and Flexible Maintenance under Learning and Deteriorating Effects

Abstract

In the last decades, the availability constraint as well as learning and deteriorating effects were introduced into the production scheduling theory to simulate real-world case studies and to overcome the limitation of the classical models. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first in the literature to address the permutation flowshop scheduling problem (PFSP) with flexible maintenance under learning and deterioration effects to minimize the makespan. Firstly, we address the PFSP with flexible maintenance and learning effects. Then, the deteriorating effect is also considered. Adaptive artificial bee colony algorithms (ABC) enhanced with Q-learning are proposed, in which the Nawaz–Enscore–Ham (NEH) heuristic and modified NEH heuristics are hybridized with a maintenance insertion heuristic to construct potential integrated initial solutions. Furthermore, a Q-learning (QL)-based neighborhood selection is applied in the employed bees phase to improve the quality of the search space solutions. Computational experiments performed on Taillard’s well-known benchmarks, augmented with both prognostic and health management (PHM) and maintenance data, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed QL-driven ABC algorithms.