This paper analyzes the characteristics of the distributed and flexible job-shop scheduling problem and proposes an improved artificial bee colony algorithm for solving the problem. Firstly, a scheduling model is established to minimize the makespan. Then, some improvements are applied to the basic artificial bee colony algorithm so that it can solve this problem effectively, including a three-dimension encoding scheme, effective population initialization method based on the characteristics of the distributed and flexible job-shop scheduling problem, many evolutionary operators are designed for the employed bee search phase, and what's more, in onlooker bee phase, a local search operator based on the critical path is introduced to improve the local search capability of the algorithm. Finally, an experiment is designed to verify the performance of the algorithm based on the test data expanded from common benchmark of the flexible job-shop scheduling problem, and orthogonal test is used to optimize the parameters in the proposed algorithm. The results show that the improved artificial bee colony algorithm can effectively solve the problem.