Basic Concept of Implementing Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) System in Flow Shop Scheduling

Flow shop scheduling is a common operational problem in a production system. Effective flow shop scheduling can help the company to improve the management system, hence increase income. Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) is a system that is widely used for scheduling optimization in a production system since 2005. However, the fundamental ABC system uses a heuristic approach to obtain an optimum solution which may not be the optimum solution at all. The ABC system is tested on the speed to obtain the optimum solution for a flowshop scheduling problem and measures the applicability of the schedule in terms of makespan. A simple model of ABC algorithm was developed to identify the effectiveness of the ABC for solving flow shop scheduling problem compared to other established methods. Result shows the ABC model is capable of producing best makespan in flow shop problem tested.