Abstract: Abstract: In this paper, a hybrid discrete artificial bee colony algorithm (HDABC) is proposed for blocking flow shop scheduling problem via minimizing the total flow time. To guarantee the quality and diversity, NEH and the improved NEH are employed to initialize the population in HDABC algorithm. In the employed bees phase, the differential evolution strategy is used to generate the neiborhood individual. In onlooker bees phase, the tournament selection is used to select the onlooker individual which are optimized via insert operator to produce the new neighborhood individual. Besides, the tournament selection is again adopted to select the individual in the scout bees phase. Moreover, the destruction and construction are made on the better individuals, whose result replaces the worse individual. Finally, an orthogonal experiment design is performed to set HDABC’s parameters. The simulation results indicate the superiority of the proposed HDABC scheduling algorithm.