Optimization of the reflux ratio of benzene-toluene stage distillation columns by the Cuckoo algorithm

In this study, an enthalpy-concentration method was applied in order to model a steady state continuous benzene-toluene mixture distillation column. For a distillation tower such as the benzene- toluene splitter, there are relatively few degrees of freedom that can be manipulated in order to minimize the total annualized cost. The reflux ratio can influence the steady-state operating point and therefore influence the total annualized cost. The trade-offs between reflux ratios and total annualized cost were discussed. The Cuckoo optimization algorithm was applied to obtain a correlation for the optimum value of the reflux ratio as a power function of the economic parameters of energy price and capital cost. The results show that, at low energy price or high capital cost, the optimum reflux factor is high.

An Algorithm for Solving Generalized Single Row Facility Layout Problem

Layout design problem is to determine a suitable arrangement for the departments so that the total costs associated with the flow among departments become least. Single Row Facility Layout Problem, SRFLP, is one of the layout problems that have many practical applications. This problem and its specific scenarios are often used to model many of the raised issues in the field of facility location. SRFLP is an arrangement of n departments with a specified length in a straight line so that the sum of the weighted distances between the pairs of departments is minimized. This problem is NP-hard. In this paper, first, a lower bound for a special case of SRFLP is presented. Then, a general case of SRFLP is presented in which some new and real assumptions are added to generate more practical model. Then a lower bound, as well as an algorithm, is proposed for solving the model. Experimental results on some instances in literature show the efficiency of our algorithm.

A novel stacking-based ensemble learning model for drilling efficiency prediction in earth-rock excavation

Accurate prediction of drilling efficiency is critical for developing the earth-rock excavation schedule.The single machine learning(ML)prediction models usually suffer from problems including parameter sensitivity and overfitting.In addition,the influence of environmental and operational factors is often ignored.In response,a novel stacking-based ensemble learning method taking into account the combined effects of those factors is proposed.Through multiple comparison tests,four models,e Xtreme gradient boosting(XGBoost),random forest(RF),back propagation neural network(BPNN)as the base learners,and support vector regression(SVR)as the meta-learner,are selected for stacking.Furthermore,an improved cuckoo search optimization(ICSO)algorithm is developed for hyper-parameter optimization of the ensemble model.The application to a real-world project demonstrates that the proposed method outperforms the popular single ML method XGBoost and the ensemble model optimized by particle swarm optimization(PSO),with 16.43%and 4.88%improvements of mean absolute percentage error(MAPE),respectively.