Investigation of Ant System parameter interactions by using design of experiments for job-shop scheduling problems

In recent years, one of the most important and promising research fields has been metaheuristics to find optimal or near-optimal solutions for NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. Improving the quality of the solution or the solution time is basic research area on metaheuristics. Modifications of the existing ones or creation of hybrid approaches are the focus of these efforts. Another area of improving the solution quality of metaheuristics is finding the optimal combination of algorithm control parameters. This is usually done by design of experiments or one-at-a-time approach in genetic algorithms, simulated annealing and similar metaheuristics. We observe that, in studies which use Ant Colonies Optimization (ACO) as an optimization technique; the levels of control parameters are determined by some non-systematic initial experiments and the interactions of the parameters are not studied yet.In this study, the parameters of Ant System have been investigated on different sized and randomly generated job-shop scheduling problems by using design of experiments. The effects and interactions of the parameters have been interpreted with the outputs of the experiments. Referring to the statistical analysis it is observed that none of the interactions between the Ant System parameters has a significant effect on makespan value. A specific fractional experimental design is suggested instead of the full factorial design. Depending on the findings from the benchmark problems it will be a reliable approach to use the suggested design for saving time and effort in experiments without sacrificing the solution quality.