A discrete artificial bee colony method based on variable neighborhood structures for the distributed permutation flowshop problem with sequence-dependent setup times

•The DPFSP with SDST under minimization of total flowtime is investigated in the paper;.•We propose a constructive heuristic framework, which contains three constructive heuristics, to obtain good initial solutions for our DABCvns;.•By analyzing the characteristics of problem-specific, four different neighborhood structures are proposed and selectively applied in three stages to obtain more feasible neighborhood solutions;.•A new population update strategy is adopted in scout bee phase to help algorithm explore new promising area;.•The experimental evaluation is used to verify the validity of constructive heuristics and DABCvns.