Marriage in honeybee optimization to scheduling problems

The biological inspired optimization techniques have proven to be powerful tools for solving scheduling problems. Marriage in Honeybee Optimization is a recent biological technique that attempts to emulate the social behavior in a bee colony and although has been applied to only a limited number of problems, it has delivered promising results. By means of this technique in this chapter the authors explore the solution space of scheduling problems by identifying an appropriate representation for each studied case. Two cases were considered: the minimization of earliness-tardiness penalties in a single machine scheduling and the permutation flow shop problem. The performance was evaluated for the first case with 280 instances from the literature. The technique performed quite well for a wide range of instances and achieved an average improvement of 1.4% for all instances. They obtained better solutions than the available upper bound for 141 instances. In the second case, they achieved an average error of 3.5% for the set of 120 test instances.