Applying Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) algorithm to dynamic job shop scheduling problems

Abstract

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is applied to two dynamic job scheduling problems, which have the same mean total workload but different dynamic levels and disturbing severity. Its performances are statistically analysed and the effects of its adaptation mechanism and parameters such as the minimal number of iterations and the size of searching ants are studied. The results show that ACO can perform effectively in both cases; the adaptation mechanism can significantly improve the performance of ACO when disturbances are not severe; increasing the size of iterations and ants per iteration does not necessarily improve the overall performance of ACO. Copyright © 2008, Inderscience Publishers.