An ant colony algorithm-based fast configuration design method for large container cranes

Customers' special need is one of the key drivers in product configuration design. The complexity of configuration design for large container cranes is known as non-deterministic polynomial-time (NP) hard. We are interested in the fast configuration model and method that support large container cranes configuration. In this paper, a rapid configuration design framework for large-scale container cranes is proposed. A constrained 0-1 programming gene evolutionary model is constructed. We propose an ant colony algorithm-based fast configuration design method. A design example of the cart mechanism is provided to test the validity and evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method, in which performances of different algorithms are compared. Results have shown that the method presented here is able to converge with solutions of good quality. [Received 05 December 2014; Revised 01 July 2015; Accepted 21 September 2015]