Increasing the total net revenue for single machine order acceptance and scheduling problems using an artificial bee colony algorithm

The order acceptance and scheduling (OAS) problem is an important topic for make-to-order production systems with limited production capacity and tight delivery requirements. This paper proposes a new algorithm based on Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) for solving the single machine OAS problem with release dates and sequence-dependent setup times. The performance of the proposed ABC-based algorithm was validated by a benchmark problem set of test instances with up to 100 orders. Experimental results showed that the proposed ABC-based algorithm outperformed three state-of-art metaheuristic-based algorithms from the literature. It is believed that this study successfully demonstrates a high-performance algorithm that can serve as a new benchmark approach for future research on the OAS problem addressed in this study.