A feedback-based artificial bee colony for distributed heterogeneous two-stage hybrid flow shop scheduling with setup times and maintenance

Distributed two-stage hybrid flow shop scheduling problem (DTHFSP) is often considered; however, DTHFSP with more than one processing constraints is seldom studied in the heterogeneous factories. Feedback is also seldom integrated with meta-heuristic to obtain high quality solutions. In this study, DTHFSP with sequence-dependent setup times (SDST) and preventive maintenance (PM) is investigated in heterogeneous factories and a feedback-based artificial bee colony (FABC) is proposed to minimize makespan and total tardiness simultaneously. To produce high quality solutions, two dynamic combinations of global search and neighborhood search are adopted in employed bee phase and onlooker bee phase, a new effective feedback is implemented, which is applied to decide dynamically search operator and search times of reinforcement search. Extensive experiments are conducted and the computational results validated that new strategies of FABC are effective and efficient and FABC can provide better results than methods from literature on the considered problem.