Soft Computing Based Cavity Temperature Control of Plastic Injection Molding system

The plastic parts having complex three dimensional structures are produced by Plastic injection molding system. Thequality of the product is determined by controlling the temperature of the mold cavity. The mold cavity temperature controlwith the conventional ON/OFF, PI, and PID controllers have several disadvantages. This paper proposes the method toreduce settling time and undershoot in cavity temperature control with selected evolutionary algorithms. The controllerparameters are optimized with Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) Algorithm for PID and I-PDcontrollers by considering Mean Square Error (MSE) as fitness function. Compared to conventional methods theparameter optimization using soft computing methods such as GA and PSO improves the performance indices of PID andI-PD controllers

CHEMOTAXIS DIFFERENTIAL EVOLUTION OPTIMIZATION TECHNIQUES FOR GLOBAL OPTIMIZATION

Nature inspired and bio-inspired algorithms have been recently used for solving low and high dimensional search and optimization problems. In this context, Bacterial Foraging Optimization Algorithm (BFOA) and Differential Evolution (DE) have been widely employed as global optimization techniques inspired from social foraging behavior of Escheria coli bacteria and evolutionary ideas such as mutation, crossover, and selection, respectively. BFOA employs chemotaxis (tumble and run steps of a bacterium in its lifetime) activity for local search whereas the global search is performed by elimination-dispersal operator. Elimination-dispersal operator kills or disperses some bacteria and replaces others randomly in the search space. This operator mimics bacterium’s death or dispersal in case of high temperature or sudden water flow in the environment. DE employs the mutation and crossover operators to make a local and a global search that explore the search space. Exploration and exploitation balance of DE is performed by two different parameters: mutation scaling factor and crossover rate. These two parameters along with the number of population have an enormous impact on optimization performance. In this thesis, two novel hybrid techniques called Chemotaxis Differential Evolution Optimization Algorithm (CDEOA) for low dimensions and micro CDEOA (μCDEOA) for high dimensional problems are proposed. In these techniques, we incorporate the principles of DE into BFOA with two conditions. What makes our techniques different from its counterparts is that it is based on two optimization strategies: exploration of a bacterium in case of its failure to explore its vicinity for food source and exploitation of a bacterium in case of its achievement to exploit more food source. By means of these evolutionary ideas, we manage to establish an efficient balance between exploration of new areas in the search space and exploitation of search space gradients. Statistics of the computer simulations indicate that μCDEOA outperforms, or is comparable to, its competitors in terms of its convergence rates and quality of final solution for complex high dimensional problems

Nature-inspired Methods for Stochastic, Robust and Dynamic Optimization

Nature-inspired algorithms have a great popularity in the current scientific community, being the focused scope of many research contributions in the literature year by year. The rationale behind the acquired momentum by this broad family of methods lies on their outstanding performance evinced in hundreds of research fields and problem instances. This book gravitates on the development of nature-inspired methods and their application to stochastic, dynamic and robust optimization. Topics covered by this book include the design and development of evolutionary algorithms, bio-inspired metaheuristics, or memetic methods, with empirical, innovative findings when used in different subfields of mathematical optimization, such as stochastic, dynamic, multimodal and robust optimization, as well as noisy optimization and dynamic and constraint satisfaction problems

Soft computing applied to optimization, computer vision and medicine

Artificial intelligence has permeated almost every area of life in modern society, and its significance continues to grow. As a result, in recent years, Soft Computing has emerged as a powerful set of methodologies that propose innovative and robust solutions to a variety of complex problems. Soft Computing methods, because of their broad range of application, have the potential to significantly improve human living conditions. The motivation for the present research emerged from this background and possibility. This research aims to accomplish two main objectives: On the one hand, it endeavors to bridge the gap between Soft Computing techniques and their application to intricate problems. On the other hand, it explores the hypothetical benefits of Soft Computing methodologies as novel effective tools for such problems. This thesis synthesizes the results of extensive research on Soft Computing methods and their applications to optimization, Computer Vision, and medicine. This work is composed of several individual projects, which employ classical and new optimization algorithms. The manuscript presented here intends to provide an overview of the different aspects of Soft Computing methods in order to enable the reader to reach a global understanding of the field. Therefore, this document is assembled as a monograph that summarizes the outcomes of these projects across 12 chapters. The chapters are structured so that they can be read independently. The key focus of this work is the application and design of Soft Computing approaches for solving problems in the following: Block Matching, Pattern Detection, Thresholding, Corner Detection, Template Matching, Circle Detection, Color Segmentation, Leukocyte Detection, and Breast Thermogram Analysis. One of the outcomes presented in this thesis involves the development of two evolutionary approaches for global optimization. These were tested over complex benchmark datasets and showed promising results, thus opening the debate for future applications. Moreover, the applications for Computer Vision and medicine presented in this work have highlighted the utility of different Soft Computing methodologies in the solution of problems in such subjects. A milestone in this area is the translation of the Computer Vision and medical issues into optimization problems. Additionally, this work also strives to provide tools for combating public health issues by expanding the concepts to automated detection and diagnosis aid for pathologies such as Leukemia and breast cancer. The application of Soft Computing techniques in this field has attracted great interest worldwide due to the exponential growth of these diseases. Lastly, the use of Fuzzy Logic, Artificial Neural Networks, and Expert Systems in many everyday domestic appliances, such as washing machines, cookers, and refrigerators is now a reality. Many other industrial and commercial applications of Soft Computing have also been integrated into everyday use, and this is expected to increase within the next decade. Therefore, the research conducted here contributes an important piece for expanding these developments. The applications presented in this work are intended to serve as technological tools that can then be used in the development of new devices

Training Single Walled Carbon Nanotube based Materials to perform computation

This thesis illustrates the use of Single Walled Carbon Nanotube based materials for the solution of various computational problems by using the process of computer controlled evolution. The study aims to explore and identify three dimensions of a form of unconventional computing called, `Evolution-in-materio'. First, it focuses on identifying suitable materials for computation. Second, it explores suitable methods, i.e. optimisation and evolutionary algorithms to train these materials to perform computation. And third, it aims to identify suitable computational problems to test with these materials. Different carbon based materials, mainly single walled carbon nano-tubes with their varying concentrations in polymers have been studied to be trained for different computational problems using the principal of `evolution-in-materio'. The conductive property of the materials is used to train these materials to perform some meaningful computation. The training process is formulated as an optimisation problem with hardware in loop. It involves the application of an external stimuli (voltages) on the material which brings changes in its electrical properties. In order to train the material for a specific computational problem, a large number of configuration signals need to be tested to find the one that transforms the incident signal in such a way that a meaningful computation can be extracted from the material. An evolutionary algorithm is used to identify this configuration data and using a hardware platform, this data is transformed into incident signals. Depending on the computational problem, the specific voltages signals when applied at specific points on to the material, as identified by an evolutionary algorithm, can make the material behave as a Logic gate, a tone discriminator or a data classifier. The problem is implemented on two types of hardware platforms, one a more simple implementation using mbed ( a micro- controller) and other is a purpose-built platform for `Evolution-in-materio" called Mecobo. The results of this study showed that the single walled carbon nanotube composites can be trained to perform simple computational tasks (such as tone discriminator, AND, OR logic gates and a Half adder circuit), as well as complex computational problems such as Full Adder circuit and various binary and multiple class machine learning problems. The study has also identified the suitability of using evolutionary algorithms such as Particle Swarm Optimisation algorithm (PSO) and Differential evolution for finding solutions of complex computational problems such as complex logic gates and various machine learning classification problems. The implementation of classification problem with the carbon nanotube based materials also identified the role of a classifier. It has been found that K-nearest neighbour method and its variant kNN ball tree algorithm are more suitable to train carbon nanotube based materials for different classification problems. The study of varying concentrations of single walled carbon nanotubes in fixed polymer ratio for the solution of different computational problems provided an indication of the link between single walled carbon nanotubes concentration and ability to solve computational problem. The materials used in this study showed stability in the results for all the considered computational problems. These material systems can compliment the current electronic technology and can be used to create a new type of low energy and low cost electronic devices. This offers a promising new direction for evolutionary computation

k-Means

The k-means clustering algorithm (k-means for short) provides a method offinding structure in input examples. It is also called the Lloyd–Forgy algorithm as it was independently introduced by both Stuart Lloyd and Edward Forgy. k-means, like other algorithms you will study in this part of the book, is an unsupervised learning algorithm and, as such, does not require labels associated with input examples. Recall that unsupervised learning algorithms provide a way of discovering some inherent structure in the input examples. This is in contrast with supervised learning algorithms, which require input examples and associated labels so as to fit a hypothesis function that maps input examples to one or more output variables