An ant algorithm for the single row layout problem in flexible manufacturing systems [An article from: Computers and Operations Research]

This digital document is a journal article from Computers and Operations Research, published by Elsevier in 2005. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Single row machine layout problem is one of the most commonly used layout patterns, especially in flexible manufacturing systems. In this paper, this problem is formulated as a non-linear 0-1 programming model in which the distance between the machines is sequence dependent. An ant algorithm has been developed to solve this problem. A technique is proposed to efficiently implement the proposed algorithm. The performance of the proposed heuristic is tested over a number of problems selected from the literature. Computational results indicate that the proposed approach is more effective compared to many existing algorithms in this area.