A problem-specific knowledge based artificial bee colony algorithm for scheduling distributed permutation flowshop problems with peak power consumption

A distributed permutation flowshop scheduling problem (DPFSP) with peak power consumption is addressed in this work. The instantaneous energy consumption of each factory cannot exceed a threshold. First, a mathematical model is developed to describe the concerned problem. Second, an improved artificial bee colony (IABC) algorithm is proposed. Based on problem-specific knowledge, three new solution generation operators, e.g., shift, swap, and speed adjust, are designed for employ bees and onlooker bees. A local search operation is developed to improve the quality of current best-known solution in each iteration. 450 instances are solved to evaluate the performance of IABC via comparing to seven state-of-the-art algorithms. The average relative percentage increase (ARPI) of IABC ranks 1 among all compared algorithms. The results and discussions show that the proposed IABC algorithm has strong competitiveness for solving the DPFSP with peak power consumption.