The concept of ant colony algorithm for scheduling of flexible manufacturing systems

Abstract

The paper presents the conception of algorithm for scheduling of manufacturing systems with consideration of flexible resources and production routes. The proposed algorithm is based on ant colony optimisation (ACO) mechanisms. Although ACO metaheuristics do not guarantee finding optimal solutions, and their performance strongly depends on the intensification and the diversification parameters tuning, they are an interesting alternatives in solving NP hard problems. Their effectiveness and comparison with other methods are presented e.g. in [1, 4, 8]. The discussed search space is defined by the graph of operations planning relationships of the set of orders – the directed AND/OR-type graph describing precedence relations between all operations for scheduling. In the structure of the graph the notation ‘operation on the node’ is used. The presented model supports complex production orders, with hierarchical structures of processes and their execution according to both forward and backward strategies.