A comprehensive survey on cultural algorithms

Peer reviewedPostprin

Volumetric Techniques for Product Routing and Loading Optimisation in Industry 4.0: A Review

Industry 4.0 has become a crucial part in the majority of processes, components, and related modelling, as well as predictive tools that allow a more efficient, automated and sustainable approach to industry. The availability of large quantities of data, and the advances in IoT, AI, and data-driven frameworks, have led to an enhanced data gathering, assessment, and extraction of actionable information, resulting in a better decision-making process. Product picking and its subsequent packing is an important area, and has drawn increasing attention for the research community. However, depending of the context, some of the related approaches tend to be either highly mathematical, or applied to a specific context. This article aims to provide a survey on the main methods, techniques, and frameworks relevant to product packing and to highlight the main properties and features that should be further investigated to ensure a more efficient and optimised approach

Perfectionism Search Algorithm (PSA): An Efficient Meta-Heuristic Optimization Approach

This paper proposes a novel population-based meta-heuristic optimization algorithm, called Perfectionism Search Algorithm (PSA), which is based on the psychological aspects of perfectionism. The PSA algorithm takes inspiration from one of the most popular model of perfectionism, which was proposed by Hewitt and Flett. During each iteration of the PSA algorithm, new solutions are generated by mimicking different types and aspects of perfectionistic behavior. In order to have a complete perspective on the performance of PSA, the proposed algorithm is tested with various nonlinear optimization problems, through selection of 35 benchmark functions from the literature. The generated solutions for these problems, were also compared with 11 well-known meta-heuristics which had been applied to many complex and practical engineering optimization problems. The obtained results confirm the high performance of the proposed algorithm in comparison to the other well-known algorithms

Bio-inspired computation: where we stand and what's next

In recent years, the research community has witnessed an explosion of literature dealing with the adaptation of behavioral patterns and social phenomena observed in nature towards efficiently solving complex computational tasks. This trend has been especially dramatic in what relates to optimization problems, mainly due to the unprecedented complexity of problem instances, arising from a diverse spectrum of domains such as transportation, logistics, energy, climate, social networks, health and industry 4.0, among many others. Notwithstanding this upsurge of activity, research in this vibrant topic should be steered towards certain areas that, despite their eventual value and impact on the field of bio-inspired computation, still remain insufficiently explored to date. The main purpose of this paper is to outline the state of the art and to identify open challenges concerning the most relevant areas within bio-inspired optimization. An analysis and discussion are also carried out over the general trajectory followed in recent years by the community working in this field, thereby highlighting the need for reaching a consensus and joining forces towards achieving valuable insights into the understanding of this family of optimization techniques

Bio-inspired computation: where we stand and what's next

In recent years, the research community has witnessed an explosion of literature dealing with the adaptation of behavioral patterns and social phenomena observed in nature towards efficiently solving complex computational tasks. This trend has been especially dramatic in what relates to optimization problems, mainly due to the unprecedented complexity of problem instances, arising from a diverse spectrum of domains such as transportation, logistics, energy, climate, social networks, health and industry 4.0, among many others. Notwithstanding this upsurge of activity, research in this vibrant topic should be steered towards certain areas that, despite their eventual value and impact on the field of bio-inspired computation, still remain insufficiently explored to date. The main purpose of this paper is to outline the state of the art and to identify open challenges concerning the most relevant areas within bio-inspired optimization. An analysis and discussion are also carried out over the general trajectory followed in recent years by the community working in this field, thereby highlighting the need for reaching a consensus and joining forces towards achieving valuable insights into the understanding of this family of optimization techniques

An adaptive opposition-based learning selection: the case for Jaya algorithm

Over the years, opposition-based Learning (OBL) technique has been proven to effectively enhance the convergence of meta-heuristic algorithms. The fact that OBL is able to give alternative candidate solutions in one or more opposite directions ensures good exploration and exploitation of the search space. In the last decade, many OBL techniques have been established in the literature including the Standard-OBL, General-OBL, Quasi Reflection-OBL, Centre-OBL and Optimal-OBL. Although proven useful, much existing adoption of OBL into meta-heuristic algorithms has been based on a single technique. If the search space contains many peaks with potentially many local optima, relying on a single OBL technique may not be sufficiently effective. In fact, if the peaks are close together, relying on a single OBL technique may not be able to prevent entrapment in local optima. Addressing this issue, assembling a sequence of OBL techniques into meta-heuristic algorithm can be useful to enhance the overall search performance. Based on a simple penalized and reward mechanism, the best performing OBL is rewarded to continue its execution in the next cycle, whilst poor performing one will miss cease its current turn. This paper presents a new adaptive approach of integrating more than one OBL techniques into Jaya Algorithm, termed OBL-JA. Unlike other adoptions of OBL which use one type of OBL, OBL-JA uses several OBLs and their selections will be based on each individual performance. Experimental results using the combinatorial testing problems as case study demonstrate that OBL-JA shows very competitive results against the existing works in term of the test suite size. The results also show that OBL-JA performs better than standard Jaya Algorithm in most of the tested cases due to its ability to adapt its behaviour based on the current performance feedback of the search process