Optimization for manufacturing system based on Pheromone

A new optimization approach, called pheromone, which comes from the collective behavior of ant colonies for food foraging is proposed to optimize task allocation. These ants spread pheromone information and make global information available locally; thus, an ant agent only needs to observe its local environment in order to account for nonlocal concerns in its decisions. This approach has the capacity for task allocation model to automatically find efficient routing paths for processing orders and to reduce communication overhead, which exists in contract net protocol, in shop floor control system. An example confirms that a pheromone-based optimization approach has an excellent allocation performance in shop floor.