Virtual Cellular Manufacturing (VCM) “combines the setup efficiency typically obtained by group technology (GT) cellular manufacturing (CM) systems with the routing flexibility of a job shop.”
For VCM, network topology is the arrangement of the various elements (links, nodes, etc.) of a production network.
A networked virtual cellular manufacturing (NVCM) system incorporates network topology into traditional VCM systems, measuring and reporting in real time both local and geographically remote distributed VCM processes.
As an artificial intelligence (AI) technique that optimizes a problem by iteratively trying to improve a candidate solution with regard to a given measure of utility, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is a population-based stochastic search algorithm.
Inspired from observations of birds flocking and fish schooling, PSO optimizes a problem by having a population of candidate solutions, here dubbed particles, and moving these particles around in the search-space according to simple mathematical formulae over the particle’s position and velocity with the following simple optimization procedure:
Initialize parameters
Initialize populations
Evaluate
Do {
Find the personal best
Find the global best
Update velocity
Update position
Evaluate
}While(End)
Comparing with individual virtual cellular manufacturing system, a networked virtual cellular manufacturing system is population-based. PSO can be applied to optimize the population topology of a networked virtual cellular manufacturing system.
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