The Ant Lion Optimization Algorithm for Integrated Process Planning and Scheduling

Abstract

Process planning and scheduling are two of the most important manufacturing functions which are usually performed sequentially in traditional approaches. Considering the fact that these functions are usually complementary, it is necessary to integrate them so as to improve performance of a manufacturing system. This paper presents implementation of novel nature-inspired Ant Lion Optimization (ALO) algorithm for solving this combinatorial optimization problem effectively. As the ALO algorithm mimics the intelligent behavior of antlions in hunting ants, the main steps of hunting prey, its mathematical modeling, and optimization procedure for integration of process planning and scheduling is proposed. The algorithm is implemented in Matlab environment and run on the 3.10 GHz processor with 2 GBs of RAM memory. Experimental results show applicability of the proposed approach in solving integrated process planning and scheduling problem.