In order to improve the production of process industry, the ant colony system(ACS) was applied to the production scheduling problem. Based on the analysis of the production scheduling problem for process industry, a production scheduling model was established, whose goal was to obtain the shortest total process time. The search strategy, heuristic information rules, pheromone updating mechanism, process step starting time and detailed algorithm implementation of ACS were discussed. Using a practical production scheduling problem as an example, the established model and designed algorithm were applied to implement the scheduling simulation. The simulation results show that the scheduling model and algorithm are feasible, and have a better scheduling performance than the stochastic scheduling method, and can be applied to solve practical production scheduling problem for process industry.
Classes of random walks on temporal networks with competing timescales