HYBRID GENETIC — ANT COLONY ALGORITHMS FOR SOLVING AGGREGATE PRODUCTION PLAN

It is necessary for the management of any industry to workout an intermediate range plan also known as aggregate production plan, consistently with the long range policies and resources allocated by long range decisions. It is a procedure of translating the expected demand and production capacity of the available facilities into future manufacturing plans for a family of products. It includes decisions on production quantity, work force and inventory to workout a low cost product and timely delivery. Ant colony optimization algorithm finds its extensive application in solving job shop scheduling, assignment problems, transportation problems, etc. Genetic algorithms are proposed to solve the problem, already by the authors. In this paper, an attempt is made to solve an aggregate production-planning problem for obtaining an effective solution using ant colony algorithm. Also a hybrid algorithm that combines genetic algorithm and ant colony algorithm is proposed and its effectiveness over the models developed using genetic algorithms and ant colony algorithm is also analyzed.