Artificial bee colony algorithm with comprehensive search mechanism for numerical optimization

The artificial bee colony （ABC） algorithm is a sim- ple and effective global optimization algorithm which has been successfully applied in practical optimization problems of various fields. However, the algorithm is still insufficient in balancing ex- ploration and exploitation. To solve this problem, we put forward an improved algorithm with a comprehensive search mechanism. The search mechanism contains three main strategies. Firstly, the heuristic Gaussian search strategy composed of three different search equations is proposed for the employed bees, which fully utilizes and balances the exploration and exploitation of the three different search equations by introducing the selectivity probability P,. Secondly, in order to improve the search accuracy, we propose the Gbest-guided neighborhood search strategy for onlooker bees to improve the exploitation performance of ABC. Thirdly, the self- adaptive population perturbation strategy for the current colony is used by random perturbation or Gaussian perturbation to en- hance the diversity of the population. In addition, to improve the quality of the initial population, we introduce the chaotic opposition- based learning method for initialization. The experimental results and Wilcoxon signed ranks test based on 27 benchmark func- tions show that the proposed algorithm, especially for solving high dimensional and complex function optimization problems, has a higher convergence speed and search precision than ABC and three other current ABC-based algorithms.

Genetic algorithm for short-term scheduling of make-and-pack batch production process

This paper considers a scheduling problem in industrial make-and-pack batch production process. This process equips with sequence-dependent changeover time, multipurpose storage units with limited capacity, storage time, batch splitting, partial equipment connectivity and transfer time. The objective is to make a production plan to satisfy all constraints while meeting demand requirement of packed products from various product families. This problem is NP-hard and the problem size is exponentially large for a realistic-sized problem. Therefore,we propose a genetic algorithm to handle this problem. Solutions to the problems are represented by chromosomes of product family sequences. These sequences are decoded to assign the resource for producing packed products according to forward assignment strategy and resource selection rules. These techniques greatly reduce unnecessary search space and improve search speed. In addition, design of experiment is carefully utilized to determine appropriate parameter settings. Ant colony optimization and Tabu search are also implemented for comparison. At the end of each heuristics, local search is applied for the packed product sequence to improve makespan. In an experimental analysis, all heuristics show the capability to solve large instances within reasonable computational time. In all problem instances, genetic algorithm averagely outperforms ant colony optimization and Tabu search with slightly longer computational time.