As a reaction to the growing demands of the market on enterprises, ever more complex procedures for production control are being developed. Most recently, self-organising procedures, which often mimic the behaviour of natural systems (e.g. evolutionary or genetic algorithms), have come to the fore. The methods of Swarm Intelligence and, in particular, the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), which are characterised by their flexibility and adaptability, could serve as a basis for this. The ifab-Institute has developed a procedure for the short-term, operative manufacturing control based on this approach, which will be presented in this article.
