An Ant Colony Algorithm for the Order Planning of the Iron-Steel Plant

Based on the management goals of order planning of the iron-steel plants, a mixed integer programming model for the order planning is constructed. The goals include balancing production capacity and minimizing the total cost of infringing contracts. As the data of orders and processes are put together to make a point graph, the problem of order planning is transferred into an improved traveling salesman problem. An improved ant colony algorithm is presented to solve this model. The computational results show that the model comes up to the production processes, the satisfying solutions can be obtained within acceptable time.