Automating control system design via a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm

This chapter presents a performance-prioritized computer aided control system design (CACSD) methodology using a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm. The evolutionary CACSD approach unifies different control laws in both the time and frequency domains based upon performance satisfactions, without the need of aggregating different design criteria into a compromise function. It is shown that control engineers' expertise as well as settings on goal or priority for different preference on each performance requirement can be easily included and modified on-line according to the evolving trade-offs, which makes the controller design interactive, transparent and simple for real-time implementation. Advantages of the evolutionary CACSD methodology are illustrated upon a non-minimal phase plant control system, which offer a set of low-order Pareto optimal controllers satisfying all the conflicting performance requirements in the face of system constraints

Optimal advertising campaign generation for multiple brands using MOGA

The paper proposes a new modified multiobjective genetic algorithm (MOGA) for the problem of optimal television (TV) advertising campaign generation for multiple brands. This NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem with numerous constraints is one of the key issues for an advertising agency when producing the optimal TV mediaplan. The classical approach to the solution of this problem is the greedy heuristic, which relies on the strength of the preceding commercial breaks when selecting the next break to add to the campaign. While the greedy heuristic is capable of generating only a group of solutions that are closely related in the objective space, the proposed modified MOGA produces a Pareto-optimal set of chromosomes that: 1) outperform the greedy heuristic and 2) let the mediaplanner choose from a variety of uniformly distributed tradeoff solutions. To achieve these results, the special problem-specific solution encoding, genetic operators, and original local optimization routine were developed for the algorithm. These techniques allow the algorithm to manipulate with only feasible individuals, thus, significantly improving its performance that is complicated by the problem constraints. The efficiency of the developed optimization method is verified using the real data sets from the Canadian advertising industry

Hybrid Meta-Heuristics for Robust Scheduling

The production and delivery of rapidly perishable goods in distributed supply networks involves a number of tightly coupled decision and optimization problems regarding the just-in-time production scheduling and the routing of the delivery vehicles in order to satisfy strict customer specified time-windows. Besides dealing with the typical combinatorial complexity related to activity assignment and synchronization, effective methods must also provide robust schedules, coping with the stochastic perturbations (typically transportation delays) affecting the distribution process. In this paper, we propose a novel metaheuristic approach for robust scheduling. Our approach integrates mathematical programming, multi-objective evolutionary computation, and problem-specific constructive heuristics. The optimization algorithm returns a set of solutions with different cost and risk tradeoffs, allowing the analyst to adapt the planning depending on the attitude to risk. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated by a real-world case concerning the production and distribution of ready-mixed concrete.Meta-Heuristics;Multi-Objective Genetic Optimization;Robust Scheduling;Supply Networks

Feature learning in feature-sample networks using multi-objective optimization

Data and knowledge representation are fundamental concepts in machine learning. The quality of the representation impacts the performance of the learning model directly. Feature learning transforms or enhances raw data to structures that are effectively exploited by those models. In recent years, several works have been using complex networks for data representation and analysis. However, no feature learning method has been proposed for such category of techniques. Here, we present an unsupervised feature learning mechanism that works on datasets with binary features. First, the dataset is mapped into a feature--sample network. Then, a multi-objective optimization process selects a set of new vertices to produce an enhanced version of the network. The new features depend on a nonlinear function of a combination of preexisting features. Effectively, the process projects the input data into a higher-dimensional space. To solve the optimization problem, we design two metaheuristics based on the lexicographic genetic algorithm and the improved strength Pareto evolutionary algorithm (SPEA2). We show that the enhanced network contains more information and can be exploited to improve the performance of machine learning methods. The advantages and disadvantages of each optimization strategy are discussed.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

A lexicographic multi-objective genetic algorithm for multi-label correlation-based feature selection

This paper proposes a new Lexicographic multi-objective Genetic Algorithm for Multi-Label Correlation-based Feature Selection (LexGA-ML-CFS), which is an extension of the previous single-objective Genetic Algorithm for Multi-label Correlation-based Feature Selection (GA-ML-CFS). This extension uses a LexGA as a global search method for generating candidate feature subsets. In our experiments, we compare the results obtained by LexGA-ML-CFS with the results obtained by the original hill climbing-based ML-CFS, the single-objective GA-ML-CFS and a baseline Binary Relevance method, using ML-kNN as the multi-label classifier. The results from our experiments show that LexGA-ML-CFS improved predictive accuracy, by comparison with other methods, in some cases, but in general there was no statistically significant different between the results of LexGA-ML-CFS and other methods