Optimisation of interacting production stations using a Constructive Cooperative Coevolutionary approach

Abstract

Simulation-based optimisation carries the burden of computationally expensive fitness calculations. It is very often used to tackle large-scale optimisation problems with a relatively high level of complexity. Therefore, it is of interest to have optimisation techniques dedicated to simulation-based optimisation. This paper proposes a simulation-based optimisation approach, called Constructive Cooperative Coevolutionary (C3) search procedure, to optimise the control of interacting production stations. An optimisation algorithm is embedded in the C3 search procedure to optimise subproblems separately. It includes a novel constructive heuristic that creates a feasible solution for the considered problem efficiently. It also incorporates an extended version of the existing cooperative coevolutionary method that can handle large-scale optimisation problems. Furthermore, this paper presents a case study considering a sheet metal press line as an example of interacting production stations. In this case study, the performance of the proposed C3 search procedure is evaluated and compared with other optimisation algorithms. This shows that the C3 search procedure is able to successfully optimise the press line within a given number of fitness calculations, outperforming existing algorithms. Also, it is shown that C3 can be embedded with either stochastic or deterministic optimisation algorithms, without sacrificing performance.