The Ant Lion Optimization Algorithm for Flexible Process Planning

Abstract

Obtaining an optimal process plan according to all alternative manufacturing resources has become very important task in flexible process planning problem research. In this paper, we use a novel nature-inspired algorithm called Ant Lion Optimizer (ALO) to solve this NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem. The network representation is adopted to describe flexibilities in process planning and mathematical model for the minimization of the total production time and cost is presented. The algorithm is implemented in Matlab environment and run on the 3.10 GHz processor with 2 GBs of RAM memory. The presented experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs better in comparison with other bio-inspired optimization algorithms.