Pheromone-based Dynamic Coordination for Manufacturing System

Manufacturing enterprises must face increasingly difficult production environments. External factors such as varying product variants and varying quantities as well as internal factors such as reworking and resource breakdowns pose a high challenge for task allocation and control. Inspired by the similarity between ant foraging behavior model and task allocation in manufacturing system, a pheromone-based coordination mechanism for manufacturing system is proposed. The pheromone-based static and dynamic coordination algorithms for task allocation are given. Experimental results demonstrate that not only the relatively optimal processing costs but also balanced use of machines can be achieved by using the proposed algorithm, and that it has high adaptability to the disturbance from inside or outside of manufacturing system. Therefore, it provides a feasible new idea for dealing with an actual allocation problem of production tasks for manufacturing system.