A Novel Multi-Population Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm for Energy-Efficient Hybrid Flow Shop Scheduling Problem

Considering green scheduling and sustainable manufacturing, the energy-efficient hybrid flow shop scheduling problem (EHFSP) with a variable speed constraint is investigated, and a novel multi-population artificial bee colony algorithm (MPABC) is developed to minimize makespan, total tardiness and total energy consumption (TEC), simultaneously. It is necessary for manufacturers to fully understand the notion of symmetry in balancing economic and environmental indicators. To improve the search efficiency, the population was randomly categorized into a number of subpopulations, then several groups were constructed based on the quality of subpopulations. A different search strategy was executed in each group to maintain the population diversity. The historical optimization data were also used to enhance the quality of solutions. Finally, extensive experiments were conducted. The results demonstrate that MPABC can achieve an outstanding performance on three metrics DIR, c and nd for the considered EHFSP.

Comparing Mixed-Integer Programming and Constraint Programming Models for the Hybrid Flow Shop Scheduling Problem with Dedicated Machines

The paper considers a two-stage hybrid flow shop scheduling problem with dedicated machines and release dates. Each job must be first processed on the single machine of stage 1, and then, the job is processed on one of the two dedicated machines of stage 2, depending on its type. Moreover, the jobs are available for processing at their respective release dates. Our goal is to obtain a schedule that minimizes the makespan. This problem is strongly NP-hard. In this paper, two mathematical models are developed for the problem: a mixed-integer programming model and a constraint programming model. The performance of these two models is compared on different problem configurations. And the results show that the constraint programming outperforms the mixed-integer programming in finding optimal solutions for large problem sizes (450 jobs) with very reasonable computing times.