EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Ant colony optimization with a specialized pheromone trail for the car-sequencing problem

Sara Morin, Caroline Gagné and Marc Gravel

European Journal of Operational Research, 2009, vol. 197, issue 3, 1185-1191

Abstract: This paper studies the learning process in an ant colony optimization algorithm designed to solve the problem of ordering cars on an assembly line (car-sequencing problem). This problem has been shown to be NP-hard and evokes a great deal of interest among practitioners. Learning in an ant algorithm is achieved by using an artificial pheromone trail, which is a central element of this metaheuristic. Many versions of the algorithm are found in literature, the main distinction among them being the management of the pheromone trail. Nevertheless, few of them seek to perfect learning by modifying the internal structure of the trail. In this paper, a new pheromone trail structure is proposed that is specifically adapted to the type of constraints in the car-sequencing problem. The quality of the results obtained when solving three sets of benchmark problems is superior to that of the best solutions found in literature and shows the efficiency of the specialized trail.

Keywords: Ant; colony; optimization; Pheromone; trail; Scheduling; Car-sequencing; problem (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377-2217(08)00310-X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:197:y:2009:i:3:p:1185-1191

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:ejores:v:197:y:2009:i:3:p:1185-1191