Manipulating the Onlooker Bee’s Behaviour in Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm for Permutation Flowshop Scheduling

Abstract

The artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm has attracted interest among many researchers in optimization studies. This fact is also true in the field of production planning and scheduling. This paper presents a detail step-by-step methodology to understand the effect of different onlooker bee's (OB) behaviour or strategies towards their optimization capability in solving permutation flowshop scheduling problems. This paper investigated three OB exploiting behaviours or strategies, namely total greedy, semi greedy, and non-greedy while executing the ABC algorithm in solving PFSP. Based on the simulation experiment, the authors can conclude that the exploiting behaviour of OB influences the overall ABC scheduling performance. The total greedy behaviour is the best behaviour amongst all because it generated the least error. The study also considered the total greedy behaviour as the fastest in generating 0% error data compared to other OB behaviours.