A bottom-up self-organizing approach is presented to optimize a kind of batch scheduling problems with batch
splitting in multistage production processes. Firstly, inspired by people’s business-processing activities, a self-organizing
optimization model is built up for the scheduling of multistage batch processes with batch splitting. Secondly, the complexity
resulted from sequence-dependent changeovers and batch splitting is analyzed. Then, a friendship-based selection strategy
and a batch splitting strategy based on least response are introduced in detail. Based on the strategies, a self-organizing
scheduling optimization algorithm is proposed for the given model. The presented approach can obtain optimal solutions or
near-optimal solutions in a short time when solving problems. Finally, numerical examples show the effectiveness and the
superiority of this approach.