Multi-population meta-heuristics for production scheduling: a survey

Abstract Production scheduling is one of the most critical issues in manufacturing and production systems and has markedly positive impact on the performances of manufacturing. In the past decades, various scheduling problems have been extensively solved by multi-population meta-heuristics, which are artificial bee colony (ABC), imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) and shuffled frog-leaping algorithm (SFLA); however, the related works of multi-population meta-heuristics to scheduling are hardly reviewed. In this paper, we provide an extensive recall on solving production scheduling based on ABC, ICA or SFLA. A new classification on scheduling problems is first given, then three algorithms are described and their applications to scheduling are summarized in a systematic way; finally, the main conclusions are drawn and some future research directions are presented.