Self-adaptive bee colony optimisation algorithm for the flexible job-shop scheduling problem

The bee colony optimisation (BCO) algorithm is a nature-inspired algorithm that models the natural behaviour of honey bees as they find nectar and share food sources information with other bees in the hive. This paper presents the BCO algorithm for the flexible job-shop scheduling problem (FJSP), furthermore, to improve the neighbourhood search in the BCO algorithm we introduce a self-adaptive mechanism to the BCO algorithm (self-adaptive-BCO algorithm) for adaptively selecting the neighbourhood structure to enhance the local intensification capability of the algorithm and to help the algorithm to escape from a local optimum. We perform computational experiments on three well-known benchmarks for FJSP. The BCO algorithm is compared with the self-adaptive-BCO algorithm to test the performance of the latter. The results demonstrate that the self-adaptive-BCO algorithm outperforms the BCO algorithm, the proposed approach also outperforms the best-known algorithms in some datasets and it is comparable with these algorithms in other datasets.