scholarly journals Interactive Evolutionary Computation Approach to Permutation Flow Shop Scheduling Problem

Author(s):  
Vid Keršič

Artificial intelligence and its subfields have be-come part of our everyday lives and eÿciently solve many problems that are very hard for us humans. But in some tasks, these methods strug-gle, while we, humans, are much better solvers with our intuition. Because of that, the ques-tion arises: why not combine intelligent methods with human skills and intuition? This paper pro-poses an Interactive Evolutionary Computation approach to the Permutation Flow Shop Schedul-ing Problem by incorporating human-in-the-loop in MAX-MIN Ant System through gamification of the problem. The analysis shows that combin-ing the evolutionary computation approach and human-in-the-loop leads to better solutions, sig-nificantly when the complexity of the problem in-creases.

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 3388
Author(s):  
Pan Zou ◽  
Manik Rajora ◽  
Steven Y. Liang

Though many techniques were proposed for the optimization of Permutation Flow-Shop Scheduling Problem (PFSSP), current techniques only provide a single optimal schedule. Therefore, a new algorithm is proposed, by combining the k-means clustering algorithm and Genetic Algorithm (GA), for the multimodal optimization of PFSSP. In the proposed algorithm, the k-means clustering algorithm is first utilized to cluster the individuals of every generation into different clusters, based on some machine-sequence-related features. Next, the operators of GA are applied to the individuals belonging to the same cluster to find multiple global optima. Unlike standard GA, where all individuals belong to the same cluster, in the proposed approach, these are split into multiple clusters and the crossover operator is restricted to the individuals belonging to the same cluster. Doing so, enabled the proposed algorithm to potentially find multiple global optima in each cluster. The performance of the proposed algorithm was evaluated by its application to the multimodal optimization of benchmark PFSSP. The results obtained were also compared to the results obtained when other niching techniques such as clearing method, sharing fitness, and a hybrid of the proposed approach and sharing fitness were used. The results of the case studies showed that the proposed algorithm was able to consistently converge to better optimal solutions than the other three algorithms.


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