Title: Applying Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) algorithm to dynamic job shop scheduling problems

Authors: Rong Zhou, Heow Pueh Lee, Andrew Y.C. Nee

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore, 9 Engineering Drive 1, 117576, Singapore. ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore, 9 Engineering Drive 1, 117576, Singapore. ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore, 9 Engineering Drive 1, 117576, Singapore

Abstract: Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is applied to two dynamic job scheduling problems, which have the same mean total workload but different dynamic levels and disturbing severity. Its performances are statistically analysed and the effects of its adaptation mechanism and parameters such as the minimal number of iterations and the size of searching ants are studied. The results show that ACO can perform effectively in both cases; the adaptation mechanism can significantly improve the performance of ACO when disturbances are not severe; increasing the size of iterations and ants per iteration does not necessarily improve the overall performance of ACO.

Keywords: dynamic scheduling; job shop scheduling; ant colony optimisation; ACO.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMR.2008.019212

International Journal of Manufacturing Research, 2008 Vol.3 No.3, pp.301 - 320

Published online: 02 Jul 2008 *

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