Enhancing Facility Layout via Ant Colony Technique (Act)

Abstract

Cellular manufacturing systems optimization is investigated and manipulated using artificial intelligent (AI) approach combining facility layout and group technology scope. This research applied the ANT COLONY technique  (ACT) optimization where this process was inspired by the real ants and how they move and build colonies by avoiding obstacle and simulate the process to get a procedure that can be adopted on this optimization process. In this research the problem goes in two way first the theory that take account the positions of machines inside the plant and its equations of controlling and second is the routing of part during product life cycle then execute results and applying it on factory configuration. The application of Ants system was carried out on industrial factory of electrical motor where all data was taken from the factory depending on the position and sequence of operations took place. Results were carried out in a way that depending on the showing site plan configurations for each stage and studying the iteration curve response to the parameters changes while testing the system during different environments. The results show high flexibility in ACS (Ant colony system) with fast response and high reduction in the distance crossed by the product part that reached 500m. The ratio of the reduction is 0.625.

Keyword: Artificial intelligent (AI), Ant colony (AC), pheromone, genetic algorithm, facility layout, cell manufacturing (CM).