Solving Planning and Scheduling Problems for Web Supported Plant Chains Using Hierarchical Concepts in Ant Colony Optimization

摘要

The past decade has witnessed remarkable changes in management and linkage issues, especially pertaining to plant chains. And although Concurrent Engineering (CE) principles have been utilized widely in the formulation of web-supported plant chains (WSPCs), they are challenged by the intricacies involved in implementation issues. This paper attempts to resolve the concurrent planning and scheduling (CPAS) aspects of WSPCs. A new Algorithm of Hierarchical Ants (AHA) is being proposed here, in order to solve the CPAS problem optimally. This algorithm takes its governing traits from the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). The algorithm is marked by cooperation among colonies that work in a hierarchical manner, so as to make it compatible to any problems characterized by successive decisions. Robustness of the proposed algorithm is authenticated by solving problems of varying dimension and then is simulated to map the industrial data, after which results are compared with an established GA-based strategy.