Facility Layout Planning Using Ant Algorithm

개미 알고리듬을 이용한 설비배치계획

Facility Layout Planning is concerned with how to arrange facilities necessary for production in a given space. Its objective is often to minimize the total sum of all material flows multiplied by the distance among facilities. FLP belongs to NP complete problem; i.e., the number of possible layout solutions increases with the increase of the number of facilities. Thus, meta heuristics such as Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Simulated Annealing have been investigated to solve the FLP problems. However, one of the biggest problems which lie in the existing meta heuristics including GA is hard to find an appropriate combinations of parameters which result in optimal solutions for the specific problem. The Ant System algorithm with elitist and ranking strategies is used to solve the FLP problem as an another good alternative. Experimental results show that the AS algorithm is able to produce the same level of solution quality with less sensitive parameters selection comparing to the ones obtained by applying other existing meta heuristic algorithms.