Study on integrated planning of production-distribution using ant colony optimization

Abstract

In the last decades, both scheduling and routing problems grant very important results to industry and academy. In those studies, it's observed that there are financial gains and theoretical appeal on solving those NP-Hard problems. In this scenario, the present project proposes a research on techniques to solve an integrated production-distribution problem. The production system is composed by a single machine. The distribution is composed by one vehicle with limited capacity, that could be used to perform multiple routes. The goal is to minimize total system makespan. To solve this problems, will be proposed an algorithm based on the Ant Colony Optimization meta-heuristic.