Abstract:

A beecolonyoptimization based scheduling algorithm is proposed to meet the clustering constraint which often appears in real production fields. The algorithm performs its searching operation by means of imitating the bee colony’s “foraging” and “waggle dance”, including endowing bees with different “believes” to keep the searching diversification of the colony, merging the clustering constraint into bees’ behavior as “social rule” to meet the user’s individual demands, and sharing information among the bees through “waggle dance”, i.e. making bees display their paths and choose a preferred path from others at the same time. The computational experiments on a series of JSP benchmark problems and the comparison with other algorithms validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Key words: bee colony optimization;job shop scheduling;clustering constraint