Abstract: According to the power exploration and poor exploitation ability of artificial bee colony (ABC), a balanced bee colony (FER-ABC) was proposed. This algorithm modified the search equation based on “fitness Euclidean-distance ratio” and differential algorithm (DE). The FER strategy is useful for multi-optimization and the DE is beneficial to single- optimization. In order to exploit the advantages to full, a new search structure was proposed which balanced the exploitation and exploration. For continuous problems, the simulations on twelve benchmark functions indicate that this FER-ABC algorithm can improve the accuracy effectively and increase the convergence rate apparently. For the discrete problem, this proposed algorithm is proved to be feasible and advantageous on the simulation of four standard flexible job shop scheduling module.

Key words: artificial bee colony, balanced bee colony, chaotic strategy, “fitness Euclidean-distance ratio” strategy, differential algorithm