An Artificial Bee Colony with Adaptive Competition for the Unrelated Parallel Machine Scheduling Problem with Additional Resources and Maintenance

Abstract

The unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem (UPMSP) is a typical production scheduling problem with certain symmetries on machines. Additional resources and preventive maintenance (PM) extensively exist on parallel machines; however, UPMSP with additional resources and PM has been scarcely investigated. Adaptive competition is also seldom implemented in the artificial bee colony algorithm for production scheduling. In this study, UPMSP with additional resources and PM is investigated, which has certain symmetries with machines. An artificial bee colony with adaptive competition (ABC-AC) is proposed to minimize the makespan. Two employed bee swarms are constructed and evaluated. In the employed bee phase, adaptive competition is used to dynamically decide two cases. The first is the shifting of search resources from the employed bee swarm with a lower evolution quality to another one, and the second is the migration of solutions from the employed bee swarm with a higher evolution quality to another one. An adaptive onlooker bee phase and a new scout phase are given. Extensive experiments are conducted on 300 instances. The computational results demonstrate that the new strategies of ABC-AC are effective, and ABC-AC provides promising results for the considered UPMSP.