Title: Ant Colony Optimisation for multi-level assembly job shop scheduling

Authors: M. Omkumar, P. Shahabudeen

Addresses: Department of Manufacturing Engineering, College of Engineering, Anna University, Guindy, Chennai, India. ' Department of Industrial Engineering, College of Engineering, Anna University, Guindy, Chennai, India

Abstract: Job shop scheduling is one of the most explored areas in the last few decades. Although it is very commonly witnessed in real-life situations, very little investigation has been carried out in scheduling operations of multi-level jobs, which undergo serial, parallel, and assembly operations in an assembly job shop. In this work, some of the dispatch rules, which have best performances in scheduling multi-level jobs in a dynamic assembly job shop, are tested in static assembly job shop environment. A new optimisation heuristic based on the Ant Colony Algorithm is proposed and its performance is compared with the dispatch rules. [Received 14 July 2008; Revised 11 February 2009; Accepted 16 April 2009]

Keywords: job shop scheduling; assembly job shops; ant colony optimisation; ACO; dispatching rules; multilevel assembly; makespan; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMR.2009.028538

International Journal of Manufacturing Research, 2009 Vol.4 No.4, pp.410 - 427

Published online: 18 Sep 2009 *

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