Research on partners selection of collaborative design based on ant and genetic algorithm

Optimizing collaborative design process can cut down the time to market, thus, acquire competitive advantage. Partner is very important to collaborative design, optimal combination of partners is a prerequisite for collaborative design, picking the wrong partner hurt both productivity and profitability. The issue of partners selection is a combinational optimize, this paper put forward a new method based on combination of genetic algorithm and ant algorithm, using genetic algorithm to generate preliminary pheromone distribution for ant algorithm, then ant algorithm search for optimal result, the method is applied simulation.