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

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.