Bee colony optimization algorithm with big valley landscape exploitation for job shop scheduling problems

Scheduling is a crucial activity in semiconductor manufac-turing industry. Effective scheduling in its operations leads to improvement in the efficiency and utilization of its equipment. Job Shop Scheduling is an NP-hard problem which is closely related to some of the scheduling activities in this industry. This paper presents an improved Bee Col-ony Optimization algorithm with Big Valley landscape ex-ploitation as a biologically inspired approach to solve the Job Shop Scheduling problem. Experimental results com-paring our proposed algorithm with Shifting Bottleneck Heuristic, Tabu Search Algorithm and Bee Colony Algo-rithm with Neighborhood Search on Taillard JSSP bench-mark show that it is comparable to these approaches.