A Multi-level Symbiotic Evolutionary Algorithm for FMS Loading Problems with Various Flexibilities

This paper addresses FMS(Flexible Manufacturing System) loading problems with machine, tool and process flexibilities. When designing FMS planning, it is important to take account of these flexibilities for an efficient utilization of the resources. However, almost all the existing researches do not appropriately consider various flexibilities due to the problem complexity. This paper presents a new evolutionary algorithm to solve the FMS loading problems with machine, tool and process flexibilities. The algorithm is named a multi-level symbiotic evolutionary algorithm. The proposed algorithm is compared with the existing ones in terms of solution quality and convergence speed. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our approach.