Solving the job shop scheduling problem with an enhanced artificial bee colony algorithm through local search heuristic

: Job shop scheduling problem (JSSP) is an important problem in manufacturing systems This problem is one of the NP-hard combinatorial problems so the best scheduling solution is not polynomially bounded. Meta-heuristic approaches are widely applied to solve the job shop scheduling problem and find the near optimal solutions in polynomial time. In this paper, we propose an enhanced artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm for the job shop scheduling problem. We designed more suitable local search procedures that are based on neighborhood search mechanisms to better adapt ABC for this discrete optimization problem. The experimental results showed that the proposed algorithm is effective.