A heuristic approach to auto-recovery in the supervisory control of heterogeneous automatic equipment for material handling

A heuristic approach-the cost-based ant colony system (CACS) is introduced to perform auto-recovery for the supervisory control of an automatic material handling system (AMHS) in a dynamic manufacturing environment. The proposed algorithm incorporates the dynamic nature of the AMHS into the ant colony system to search for a path with the minimum material transfer cost. The test results demonstrate that the proposed CACS can find optimal solutions within an acceptable computation time, and therefore can be successfully applied to the auto-recovery of the supervisory control of heterogeneous material handling systems.