Concurrent design activities scheduling based on adaptive ant colony algorithm

Activities scheduling in concurrent product development process is of great significance to shorten development lead time and minimize the cost. Moreover, it can eliminate the unnecessary redesign periods and guarantee that serial activities can be executed as concurrently as possible. This paper presents a constraint satisfaction adaptive ant colony algorithm (AACA) combined approach for concurrent activities scheduling. In the combined approach, the heuristic algorithm is used to obtain feasible solutions of the scheduling problem based on sequence and resource (work team) constrains, the ant colony algorithm is used to obtain the solution optimized. AACA is improved form ant colony algorithm, by the ant path selecting, pheromone intensity updating and mutating method. Simulations have shown that the proposed AACA is efficient and feasible with respect to concurrent activities scheduling.