ANT COLONY ALGORITHM FOR NEAR-OPTIMAL ARRANGEMENT OF LINEAR MACHINE LAYOUT

Ant Colony System (ACS) is a meta-heuristic methodology, inspired by the behaviour of natural ants, which has already been applied to a numerous combinatorial problems. Flexible Manufacturing Systems cope with multi-product, usually small sized production. In this research work we investigate and apply an Ant Colony Optimization algorithm, which arranges the machines of a production line so that to minimize the total amount of backward flows. The experimental results show that a near optimal solution can be found exploiting only a small portion of the feasible solution space. Thus, the proposed algorithm indicates that it is a promising method, which can be applied to complex shop floor configuration for a generalised layout. Copyright © 2006 IFAC

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