Improving hard disk drive productivity via max-min ant system

Abstract

Nowadays, hard disk drive industry has a high-value export and high growth rate continuously. Thailand was organized as a manufacturing base in the world's major hard disk. Therefore, the development of production line is necessary to have high ability to produce consistently and quickly to match the growth of the industry. It was found that the production line efficiency in production is not high as expected. Lead time and production occurs during very. This is due to a bottleneck conditions occur. This paper presents an application of Max-Min Ant system for optimal hard disk drive system. The multi objective function is to minimize lead time and work in process. We devise an appropriate construction graph and pheromone matrix representation after considering alternatives. The proposed algorithm is parameterized by number of ants/number of iterations (A/I), weight of pheromone, weight of heuristic information, and evaporation rate. By applying Max-Min ant system in solving problems, the result found successful in finding the best answer of the problem and can increase productivity and increase benefits to the product line significantly.