Research of Flexible Assembly Job-Shop Batch–Scheduling Problem Based on Improved Artificial Bee Colony

This study examined the flexible assembly job-shop scheduling problem with lot streaming (FAJSP-LS), common in multivariety and small-batch production, such as household electrical appliances. In FAJSP-LS, an assembly stage is appended to the flexible job shop, and jobs in the first stage are processed in a large batch to reduce switching costs, while leading to more waiting time, especially during the assembly stage. This article considered splitting the batch into a few sub-batches of unequal and consistent sizes to allow jobs to efficiently pass the two-stage system. With this objective, the problem was modeled as a mixed-integer linear program comprising the following two subproblems: batch splitting and batch scheduling. As the integrated problem is NP-hard, the improved bioinspired algorithm based on an artificial bee colony was proposed, including a four-layer chromosome–encoding structure to describe the solution, as well as an optimization strategy utilizing different bee colonies to synchronously solve this two-stage problem. To examine the algorithm’s efficiency, a benchmark case was used to show that better solutions can be acquired with the improved algorithm regardless of whether the batch was split into equal or unequal sizes. To promote practical implementation, the algorithm was applied to a real case refrigerator workshop and showed better performance on time efficiency when jobs were split into unequal sizes compared to jobs without splitting or splitting into equal sizes.