What is Bee Colony Optimization

Scheduling is a vital element of manufacturing processes and requires optimal solutions under undetermined conditions. Highly dynamic and, complex scheduling problems can be classified as np-hard problems. Finding the optimal solution for multi-variable scheduling problems with polynomial computation times is extremely hard. Scheduling problems of this nature can be solved up to some degree using traditional methodologies. However, intelligent optimization tools, like BBAs, are inspired by the food foraging behavior of honey bees and capable of locating good solutions efficiently. The experiments on some benchmark problems show that BBA outperforms other methods which are used to solve scheduling problems in terms of the speed of optimization and accuracy of the results. This chapter first highlights the use of BBA and its variants for scheduling and provides a classification of scheduling problems with BBA applications. Following this, a step by step example is provided for multi-mode project scheduling problem in order to show how a BBA algorithm can be implemented.