Artificial bee colony algorithms for the order scheduling with release dates

Abstract

The order scheduling models have kept growing attention in the research community. However, as studying research regarding order scheduling models with release dates is relatively limited; this study addresses an order scheduling problem with release dates where the objective function is to minimize the weighted number of tardy orders of all the given orders. To solve this intractable problem, this study first proposes some dominance properties and a lower bound used in a branch-and-bound method for finding an optimal solution. This paper then utilizes four basic bee colony algorithms, and four hybrid bee colony algorithms for searching the optimal solution and approximate solution, and performs one-way analysis of variance and Fisher’s least significant difference tests to determine and evaluate the performances of all eight proposed algorithms.