Title: Optimisation of process plans in reconfigurable manufacturing systems using ant colony technique

Authors: M. Maniraj; V. Pakkirisamy; P. Parthiban

Addresses: Department of Production Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, India ' Department of Production Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, India ' Department of Production Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract: A reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) is designed around part family products because of its customised flexibility. System scalability and machine adaptability to new products makes RMS preferable in comparison to other manufacturing systems. The modification of RMS system can be done both physically by changing layout, machines and material handling devices and logically by changing route, schedule, planning, etc. This paper aims at finding optimal process plans of a single product flow-line RMS using ant colony optimisation approach consist of two phases. In the first phase, priority-based encoding technique is applied to find feasible operation clusters and the second phase uses ant colony technique for minimising the total cost of the RMS. A case study illustrates the proposed approach by developing a tool box in MATLAB software.

Keywords: reconfigurable manufacturing systems; RMS; process planning; ant colony optimisation; ACO; part families.

DOI: 10.1504/IJENM.2014.066819

International Journal of Enterprise Network Management, 2014 Vol.6 No.2, pp.125 - 138

Received: 25 Apr 2014
Accepted: 03 Aug 2014
Published online: 14 Jan 2015 *

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