Ant colony optimization for manufacturing resource scheduling problem

Abstract

Effective scheduling has a significant influence on efficiency of resources and manufacturing systems. In this paper, we propose a model of resource scheduling based on matching mechanism and apply Ant Colony Optimization to solve this problem. During the process of seeking, ants can change the size of colony adaptively and incline to select the resources which cost less. Finally, we examine the performance of optimization in a test case scenario in container terminals and obtain satisfactory results that suggest that ACO is well suited for application in practice. © 2006 International Federation for Information Processing.