Optimization of the material flow in a manufacturing plant by use of artificial bee colony algorithm

To survive in today's competitive global market, companies must perform strategic changes in order to increase productivity, eliminating wasted materials, time, and effort. This study will examine how to optimize the time and effort required to supply raw material to different production lines in a manufacturing plant in Juarez, Mexico by minimizing the distance an operator must travel to distribute material from a warehouse to a set of different production lines with corresponding demand. The core focus of this study is similar to that of the Vehicle Routing Problem in that it is treated as a combinatorial optimization problem. The artificial bee colony algorithm is applied in order to find the optimal distribution of material with the aim of establishing a standard time for this duty by examining how this is applied in a local manufacturing plant. Results show that using this approach may be convenient to set standard times in the selected company. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.