A review on the versions of artificial bee colony algorithm for scheduling problems

Today, artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is one of the most popular swarm intelligence based optimization techniques. Although it was originally introduced to work on continuous space for numerical optimization problems, several researchers also successfully use the ABC for other problem types. In this study, variants of the ABC for scheduling problems are surveyed. Since the scheduling problems are combinatorial type problems, generally some modifications related to the solution representation or neighborhood search operators are introduced in these studies. Additionally, several enhancement ideas are also presented for the ABC algorithm such as the improvements of initialization, employed bee, onlooker bee, scout bee phases and hybrid usage with other metaheuristics or local search methods. This paper evaluates the literature, provides some analyses on its current state and gaps, and addresses possible future works. It is hoped that this review study would be beneficial for the researchers interested in this field.