An inter-cell scheduling approach considering transportation capacity constraints

The issue of inter-cell scheduling arises due to some exceptional parts having to be processed and transported frequently in different cells. This work is inspired by the equipment manufacturing industry of China. Aimed at the inter-cell scheduling problem with transportation capacity constraints, a hyper-heuristic based on discrete artificial bee colony approach and decision block is proposed, in which a dynamic decision block strategy is developed and the scout bee strategy is improved. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the traditional static decision block strategies, and has a better performance with respect to the overall performance of optimization capability and computation efficiency, which is especially more suitable for large dimension scheduling problems.