ALLOCATION OF INSPECTION EFFORT IN MULTISTAGE MANUFACTURING PROCESSES USING ANT COLONY WITH LOCAL SEARCH

摘要

Optimal allocation of inspection effort (OAIE) in multistage manufacturing processes has been studied extensively because of its importance for the overall cost reduction. The objective of this paper is to examine an approach based on the implementation of a biologically inspired generalized algorithm known as ant colony optimisation (AGO). A simulation program has been developed and computational experiments have been carried out to study the influence of the various parameters of ACO on the system performance. The obtained results have show that the proposed ant colony algorithm is capable of obtaining near optimal solution even for relatively large number of workstations.