Scheduling unrelated parallel machines with preventive maintenance and setup time: Multi-sub-colony artificial bee colony

Abstract

In this study unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem (UPMSP) with preventive maintenance (PM) and sequence dependent setup times (SDST) is investigated. A multi-sub-colony artificial bee colony (MABC) is proposed to minimize makespan and total tardiness simultaneously, in which initial population is generated by heuristics. s employed bee sub-colonies are obtained by division and all these sub-colonies except the worst one are learned by s−1 onlooker bee sub-colonies, diversified combinations of global search and neighborhood searches are adopted in employed bee phase and onlooker bee phase and two elimination processes are applied. A number of experiments are conducted. Computational results demonstrate that new strategies of MABC are effective and MABC has great advantages in solving UPSMP with PM and SDST.