An effective discrete artificial bee colony algorithm for flow shop scheduling problem with intermediate buffers

An effective discrete artificial bee colony(DABC) algorithm is proposed for the flow shop scheduling problem with intermediate buffers(IBFSP) in order to minimize the maximum completion time(i.e makespan). The effective combination of the insertion and swap operator is applied to producing neighborhood individual at the employed bee phase. The tournament selection is adopted to avoid falling into local optima, while, the optimized insert operator embeds in onlooker bee phase for further searching the neighborhood solution to enhance the local search ability of algorithm. The tournament selection with size 2 is again applied and a better selected solution will be performed destruction and construction of iterated greedy(IG) algorithm, and then the result replaces the worse one. Simulation results show that our algorithm has a better performance compared with the HDDE and CHS which were proposed recently. It provides the better known solutions for the makespan criterion to flow shop scheduling problem with limited buffers for the Car benchmark by Carlier and Rec benchmark by Reeves. The convergence curves show that the algorithm not only has faster convergence speed but also has better convergence value.

Real-Time Hybrid Flow Shop Scheduling Approach in Smart Manufacturing Environment

Smart manufacturing in the“Industry 4.0”strategy promotes the deep integration of manufacturing and information technologies,which makes the manufacturing system a ubiquitous environment.However,the real-time scheduling of such a manufacturing system is a challenge faced by many decision makers.To deal with this challenge,this study focuses on the real-time hybrid flow shop scheduling problem(HFSP).First,the characteristic of the hybrid flow shop in a smart manufacturing environment is analyzed,and its scheduling problem is described.Second,a real-time scheduling approach for the HFSP is proposed.The core module is to employ gene expression programming to construct a new and efficient scheduling rule according to the real-time status in the hybrid flow shop.With the scheduling rule,the priorities of the waiting job are calculated,and the job with the highest priority will be scheduled at this decision time point.A group of experiments are performed to prove the performance of the proposed approach.The numerical experiments show that the real-time scheduling approach outperforms other single-scheduling rules and the back-propagation neural network method in optimizing most objectives for different size instances.Therefore,the contribution of this study is the proposal of a real-time scheduling approach,which is an effective approach for real-time hybrid flow shop scheduling in a smart manufacturing environment.