An artificial bee colony algorithm for the economic lot scheduling problem

In this study, we present an artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm for the economic lot scheduling problem modelled through the extended basic period (EBP) approach. We allow both power-of-two (PoT) and non-power-of-two multipliers in the solution representation. We develop mutation strategies to generate neighbouring food sources for the ABC algorithm and these strategies are also used to develop two different variable neighbourhood search algorithms to further enhance the solution quality. Our algorithm maintains both feasible and infeasible solutions in the population through the use of some sophisticated constraint handling methods. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm succeeds to find the all the best-known EBP solutions for the high utilisation 10-item benchmark problems and improves the best known solutions for two of the six low utilisation 10-item benchmark problems. In addition, we develop a new problem instance with 50 items and run it at different utilisation levels ranging from 50 to 99% to see the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm on large instances. We show that the proposed ABC algorithm with mixed solution representation outperforms the ABC that is restricted only to PoT multipliers at almost all utilisation levels of the large instance.