An ant colony optimization algorithm for setup coordination in a two-stage production system

摘要: This paper is concerned with the coordination of setup times in a two-stage production system. The problem derived from furniture plant, where there are two consecutive departments including cutting and painting departments. Items same levels both attributes grouped into single batch advance. A sequence-dependent time required stage when new has different level attribute previous one. objective to minimize total time. In this paper, we first propose simple dispatching rule called Least Flexibility Setups (LFS) rule. LFS can yield solution better than an existing genetic algorithm while using much less computation Using as initial method heuristic desirability, Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) developed further improve solution. Computational experiments show that proposed ACO quite effective finding near-optimal