Bio-inspired multi-agent systems for reconfigurable manufacturing systems

The current market’s demand for customization and responsiveness is a major challenge for producing intelligent, adaptive manufacturing systems. The Multi-Agent System (MAS) paradigm offers an alternative way to design this kind of system based on decentralized control using distributed, autonomous agents, thus replacing the traditional centralized control approach. The MAS solutions provide modularity, flexibility and robustness, thus addressing the responsiveness property, but usually do not consider true adaptation and re-configuration. Understanding how, in nature, complex things are performed in a simple and effective way allows us to mimic nature’s insights and develop powerful adaptive systems that able to evolve, thus dealing with the current challenges imposed on manufactur- ing systems. The paper provides an overview of some of the principles found in nature and biology and analyses the effectiveness of bio-inspired methods, which are used to enhance multi-agent systems to solve complex engineering problems, especially in the manufacturing field. An industrial automation case study is used to illustrate a bio-inspired method based on potential fields to dynamically route pallets

Enhancement on the modified artificial bee colony algorithm to optimize the vehicle routing problem with time windows

The vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) is a non-deterministictime hard (NP-hard) with combinatorial optimization problem (COP). The Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) is a popular swarm intelligence algorithm for COP. In this study, existing Modified ABC (MABC) algorithm is revised to solve the VRPTW. While MABC has been reported to be successful, it does have some drawbacks, including a lack of neighbourhood structure selection during the intensification process, a lack of knowledge in population initialization, and occasional stops proceeding the global optimum. This study proposes an enhanced Modified ABC (E-MABC) algorithm which includes (i) N-MABC that overcomes the shortage of neighborhood selection by exchanging the neighborhood structure between two different routes in the solution; (ii) MABC-ACS that solves the issues of knowledge absence in MABC population initialization by incorporating ant colony system heuristics, and (iii) PMABC which addresses the occasional stops proceeding to the global optimum by introducing perturbation that accepts an abandoned solution and jumps out of a local optimum. The proposed algorithm was evaluated using benchmark datasets comprising 56 VRPTW instances and 56 Pickup and Delivery Problems with Time Windows (PDPTW). The performance has been measured using the travelled distance (TD) and the number of deployed vehicles (NV). The results showed that the proposed E-MABC has lower TD and NV than the benchmarked MABC and other algorithms. The E-MABC algorithm is better than the MABC by 96.62%, MOLNS by 87.5%, GAPSO by 53.57%, MODLEM by 76.78%, and RRGA by 42.85% in terms of TD. Additionally, the E-MABC algorithm is better than the MABC by 42.85%, MOLNS by 17.85%, GA-PSO and RRGA by 28.57%, and MODLEN by 46.42% in terms of NV. This indicates that the proposed E-MABC algorithm is promising and effective for the VRPTW and PDPTW, and thus can compete in other routing problems and COPs

Adaptive autotuning mathematical approaches for integrated optimization of automated container terminal

With the development of automated container terminals (ACTs), reducing the loading and unloading time of operation and improving the working efficiency and service level have become the key point. Taking into account the actual operation mode of loading and unloading in ACTs, a mixed integer programming model is adopted in this study to minimize the loading and unloading time of ships, which can optimize the integrated scheduling of the gantry cranes (QCs), automated guided vehicles (AGVs), and automated rail-mounted gantries (ARMGs) in automated terminals. Various basic metaheuristic and improved hybrid algorithms were developed to optimize the model, proving the effectiveness of the model to obtain an optimized scheduling scheme by numerical experiments and comparing the different performances of algorithms. The results show that the hybrid GA-PSO algorithm with adaptive autotuning approaches by fuzzy control is superior to other algorithms in terms of solution time and quality, which can effectively solve the problem of integrated scheduling of automated container terminals to improve efficiency.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

自然に学ぶ知的アルゴリズムによる最適化及び予測問題に関する研究

富山大学・富理工博甲第147号・劉燕婷・2018/09/28富山大学201

Applied (Meta)-Heuristic in Intelligent Systems

Engineering and business problems are becoming increasingly difficult to solve due to the new economics triggered by big data, artificial intelligence, and the internet of things. Exact algorithms and heuristics are insufficient for solving such large and unstructured problems; instead, metaheuristic algorithms have emerged as the prevailing methods. A generic metaheuristic framework guides the course of search trajectories beyond local optimality, thus overcoming the limitations of traditional computation methods. The application of modern metaheuristics ranges from unmanned aerial and ground surface vehicles, unmanned factories, resource-constrained production, and humanoids to green logistics, renewable energy, circular economy, agricultural technology, environmental protection, finance technology, and the entertainment industry. This Special Issue presents high-quality papers proposing modern metaheuristics in intelligent systems