A discrete artificial bee colony algorithm for the blocking flow shop scheduling problem

This paper presents a discrete bee colony algorithm for solving the blocking flow shop scheduling problem with makespan criterion. Based on the idea of iterated greedy algorithm, some new schemes for employed bee, onlooker bee and scout bee are designed. The performance of the proposed algorithm is tested on the well-known benchmark set of Taillard, and the computational results validate the effectiveness of the discrete bee colony algorithm in comparison with two recently proposed state-of-the-art algorithms. In addition, some new best known solutions for the benchmark set are provided for the considered problem.