Honey bees mating optimization algorithm for process planning problem

Process planning is a very important function in the modern manufacturing system. It impacts the efficiency of the manufacturing system greatly. The process planning problem has been proved to be a NP-hard problem. The traditional algorithms cannot solve this problem very well. Therefore, due to the intractability and importance of process planning problem, it is very necessary to develop efficiency algorithms which can obtain a good process plan with minimal global machining cost in reasonable time. In this paper, a new method based on honey bees mating optimization (HBMO) algorithm is proposed to optimize the process planning problem. With respect to the characteristics of process planning problem, the solution encoding, crossover operator, local search strategies have been developed. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, three experiments have been carried out, and the comparisons among HBMO and some other existing algorithms are also presented. The results demonstrate that the HBMO algorithm has achieved satisfactory improvement.