An artificial bee colony with aging leader in the elite group approach for intercell scheduling considering transportation capacity

Intercell transfers make the idea of creating independent cells in cellular manufacturing systems impossible, but are essential for enterprises to reduce the costs. Because intercell transportation in the equipment manufacturing industry cannot be neglected, the problem of intercell scheduling with a limited transportation capacity constraint, which is essentially the integration of part scheduling and transportation, is addressed in this paper. An artificial bee colony (ABC) with aging leader in the elite group (ALEG) approach is proposed. Different from the basic ABC algorithm, a leading mechanism, namely ALEG is used in the onlooker bee phase, which provides the colony with more opportunities to search in promising regions. Aiming at minimizing the total weighted tardiness, the experiment is conducted by applying two leading mechanisms, i.e., ALEG and the one proposed in the previous study, to ABC, respectively. Computational results show that the proposed approach is better than the latter one.