A Cooperative Co-Evolutionary Algorithm for Large-Scale Process Planning With Energy Consideration

Process planning can be an effective way to improve the energy efficiency of production processes. Aimed at reducing both energy consumption and processing time (PT), a comprehensive approach that considers feature sequencing, process selection, and physical resources allocation simultaneously is established in this paper. As the number of decision variables increase, process planning becomes a large-scale problem, and it is difficult to be addressed by simply employing a regular meta-heuristic algorithm. A cooperative co-evolutionary algorithm, which hybridizes the artificial bee colony algorithm (ABCA) and Tabu search (TS), is therefore proposed. In addition, in the proposed algorithm, a novel representation method is designed to generate feasible process plans under complex precedence. Compared with some widely used algorithms, the proposed algorithm is proven to have a good performance for handling large-scale process planning in terms of maximizing energy efficiency and production times.