Discrete Differential Evolution Algorithm Research Articles

A Discrete Differential Evolution Algorithm Based Operator Allocation Optimization Model for Balancing Control of the Hybrid Assembly Lines

A Discrete Differential Evolution Algorithm Based Operator Allocation Optimization Model for Balancing Control of the Hybrid Assembly Lines

An effective hybrid discrete differential evolution algorithm for the flow shop scheduling with intermediate buffers

In this paper, an effective hybrid discrete differential evolution (HDDE) algorithm is proposed to minimize the maximum completion time (makespan) for a flow shop scheduling problem with intermediate buffers located between two consecutive machines. Different from traditional differential evolution algorithms, the proposed HDDE algorithm adopted job permutation to represent individuals and applies job-permutation-based mutation and crossover operations to generate new candidate solutions. Moreover, a one-to-one selection scheme with probabilistic jumping is used to determine whether the candidates will become members of the target population in next generation. In addition, an efficient local search algorithm based on both insert and swap neighborhood structures is presented and embedded in the HDDE algorithm to enhance the algorithm’s local searching ability. Computational simulations and comparisons based on the well-known benchmark instances are provided. It shows that the proposed HDDE algorithm is not only capable to generate better results than the existing hybrid genetic algorithm and hybrid particle swarm optimization algorithm, but outperforms two recently proposed discrete differential evolution (DDE) algorithms as well. Especially, the HDDE algorithm is able to achieve excellent results for large-scale problems with up to 500 jobs and 20 machines.

An ensemble of discrete differential evolution algorithms for solving the generalized traveling salesman problem

In this paper, an ensemble of discrete differential evolution algorithms with parallel populations is presented. In a single populated discrete differential evolution ( DDE) algorithm, the destruction and construction ( DC) procedure is employed to generate the mutant population whereas the trial population is obtained through a crossover operator. The performance of the DDE algorithm is substantially affected by the parameters of DC procedure as well as the choice of crossover operator. In order to enable the DDE algorithm to make use of different parameter values and crossover operators simultaneously, we propose an ensemble of DDE ( eDDE) algorithms where each parameter set and crossover operator is assigned to one of the parallel populations. Each parallel parent population does not only compete with offspring population generated by its own population but also the offspring populations generated by all other parallel populations which use different parameter settings and crossover operators. As an application area, the well-known generalized traveling salesman problem ( GTSP) is chosen, where the set of nodes is divided into clusters so that the objective is to find a tour with minimum cost passing through exactly one node from each cluster. The experimental results show that none of the single populated variants was effective in solving all the GTSP instances whereas the eDDE performed substantially better than the single populated variants on a set of problem instances. Furthermore, through the experimental analysis of results, the performance of the eDDE algorithm is also compared against the best performing algorithms from the literature. Ultimately, all of the best known averaged solutions for larger instances are further improved by the eDDE algorithm.

Evolutionary Algorithm for Extractive Text Summarization

Text summarization is the process of automatically creating a compressed version of a given document preserving its information content. There are two types of summarization: extractive and abstractive. Extractive summarization methods simplify the problem of summarization into the problem of selecting a representative subset of the sentences in the original documents. Abstractive summarization may compose novel sentences, unseen in the original sources. In our study we focus on sentence based extractive document summarization. The extractive summarization systems are typically based on techniques for sentence extraction and aim to cover the set of sentences that are most important for the overall understanding of a given document. In this paper, we propose unsupervised document summarization method that creates the summary by clustering and extracting sentences from the original document. For this purpose new criterion functions for sentence clustering have been proposed. Similarity measures play an increasingly important role in document clustering. Here we’ve also developed a discrete differential evolution algorithm to optimize the criterion functions. The experimental results show that our suggested approach can improve the performance compared to sate-of-the-art summarization approaches.

A novel hybrid discrete differential evolution algorithm for blocking flow shop scheduling problems

This paper proposes a novel hybrid discrete differential evolution (HDDE) algorithm for solving blocking flow shop scheduling problems to minimize the maximum completion time (i.e. makespan). Firstly, in the algorithm, the individuals are represented as discrete job permutations, and new mutation and crossover operators are developed for this representation, so that the algorithm can directly work in the discrete domain. Secondly, a local search algorithm based on insert neighborhood structure is embedded in the algorithm to balance the exploration and exploitation by enhancing the local searching ability. In addition, a speed-up method to evaluate insert neighborhood is developed to improve the efficiency of the whole algorithm. Computational simulations and comparisons based on the well-known benchmark instances of Taillard [Benchmarks for basic scheduling problems. European Journal of Operational Research 1993;64:278–285], by treating them as blocking flow shop problem instances with makespan criterion, are provided. It is shown that the proposed HDDE algorithm not only generates better results than the existing tabu search (TS) and TS with multi-moves ( TS + M ) approaches proposed by Grabowski and Pempera [The permutation flow shop problem with blocking. A tabu search approach 2007;35:302–311], but also outperforms the hybrid differential evolution (HDE) algorithm developed by Qian et al. [An effective hybrid DE-based algorithm for multi-objective flow shop scheduling with limited buffers. Computers and operations research 2009;36(1):209–233] in terms of solution quality, robustness and search efficiency. Ultimately, 112 out of 120 best known solutions provided by Grabowski and Pempera [The permutation flow shop problem with blocking. A tabu search approach 2007;35:302–311] and Ronconi [A branch-and-bound algorithm to minimize the makespan in a flowshop problem with blocking. Annals of Operations Research 2005;138(1):53–65] are further improved by the proposed HDDE algorithm.

A novel differential evolution algorithm for bi-criteria no-wait flow shop scheduling problems

This paper presents a novel discrete differential evolution (DDE) algorithm for solving the no-wait flow shop scheduling problems with makespan and maximum tardiness criteria. First, the individuals in the DDE algorithm are represented as discrete job permutations, and new mutation and crossover operators are developed based on this representation. Second, an elaborate one-to-one selection operator is designed by taking into account the domination status of a trial individual with its counterpart target individual as well as an archive set of the non-dominated solutions found so far. Third, a simple but effective local search algorithm is developed to incorporate into the DDE algorithm to stress the balance between global exploration and local exploitation. In addition, to improve the efficiency of the scheduling algorithm, several speed-up methods are devised to evaluate a job permutation and its whole insert neighborhood as well as to decide the domination status of a solution with the archive set. Computational simulation results based on the well-known benchmarks and statistical performance comparisons are provided. It is shown that the proposed DDE algorithm is superior to a recently published hybrid differential evolution (HDE) algorithm [Qian B, Wang L, Huang DX, Wang WL, Wang X. An effective hybrid DE-based algorithm for multi-objective flow shop scheduling with limited buffers. Computers & Operations Research 2009;36(1):209–33] and the well-known multi-objective genetic local search algorithm (IMMOGLS2) [Ishibuchi H, Yoshida I, Murata T. Balance between genetic search and local search in memetic algorithms for multiobjective permutation flowshop scheduling. IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation 2003;7(2):204–23] in terms of searching quality, diversity level, robustness and efficiency. Moreover, the effectiveness of incorporating the local search into the DDE algorithm is also investigated.

A discrete differential evolution algorithm for the single machine total weighted tardiness problem with sequence dependent setup times

This paper is concerned with solving the single machine total weighted tardiness problem with sequence dependent setup times by a discrete differential evolution algorithm developed by the authors recently. Its performance is enhanced by employing different population initialization schemes based on some constructive heuristics such as the well-known NEH and the greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) as well as some priority rules such as the earliest weighted due date (EWDD) and the apparent tardiness cost with setups (ATCS). Additional performance enhancement is further achieved by the inclusion of a referenced local search (RLS) in the algorithm together with the use of destruction and construction (DC) procedure when obtaining the mutant population. Furthermore, to facilitate the greedy job insertion into a partial solution which will be employed in the NEH, GRASP, DC heuristics as well as in the RLS local search, some newly designed speed-up methods are presented for the insertion move for the first time in the literature. They are novel contributions of this paper to the single machine tardiness related scheduling problems with sequence dependent setup times. To evaluate its performance, the discrete differential evolution algorithm is tested on a set of benchmark instances from the literature. Through the analyses of experimental results, its highly effective performance with substantial margins both in solution quality and CPU time is shown against the best performing algorithms from the literature, in particular, against the very recent newly designed particle swarm and ant colony optimization algorithms of Anghinolfi and Paolucci [A new discrete particle swarm optimization approach for the single machine total weighted tardiness scheduling problem with sequence dependent setup times. European Journal of Operational Research 2007; doi: 10.1016/j.ejor.2007.10.044] and Anghinolfi and Paolucci [A new ant colony optimization approach for the single machine total weighted tardiness scheduling problem. http://www.discovery.dist.unige.it/papers/Anghinolfi_Paolucci_ACO.pdf, respectively. Ultimately, 51 out of 120 overall aggregated best known solutions so far in the literature are further improved while other 50 instances are solved equally.

A discrete differential evolution algorithm for the permutation flowshop scheduling problem

Very recently, Pan et al. [Proceedings of the 9th Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, GECCO07, pp. 126–33] presented a new and novel discrete differential evolution algorithm for the permutation flowshop scheduling problem with the makespan criterion. On the other hand, the iterated greedy algorithm is proposed by [Ruiz, R., & Stützle, T. (2007). A simple and effective iterated greedy algorithm for the permutation flowshop scheduling problem. European Journal of Operational Research, 177(3), 2033–49] for the permutation flowshop scheduling problem with the makespan criterion. However, both algorithms are not applied to the permutation flowshop scheduling problem with the total flowtime criterion. Based on their excellent performance with the makespan criterion, we extend both algorithms in this paper to the total flowtime objective. Furthermore, we propose a new and novel referenced local search procedure hybridized with both algorithms to further improve the solution quality. The referenced local search exploits the space based on reference positions taken from a reference solution in the hope of finding better positions for jobs when performing insertion operation. Computational results show that both algorithms with the referenced local search are either better or highly competitive to all the existing approaches in the literature for both objectives of makespan and total flowtime. Especially for the total flowtime criterion, their performance is superior to the particle swarm optimization algorithms proposed by [Tasgetiren, M. F., Liang, Y. -C., Sevkli, M., Gencyilmaz, G. (2007). Particle swarm optimization algorithm for makespan and total flowtime minimization in permutation flowshop sequencing problem. European Journal of Operational Research, 177(3), 1930–47] and [Jarboui, B., Ibrahim, S., Siarry, P., Rebai, A. (2007). A combinatorial particle swarm optimisation for solving permutation flowshop problems. Computers & Industrial Engineering, doi:10.1016/j.cie.2007.09.006]. Ultimately, for Taillard’s benchmark suite, four best known solutions for the makespan criterion as well as 40 out of the 90 best known solutions for the total flowtime criterion are further improved by either one of the algorithms presented in this paper.

A novel differential evolution algorithm for no-idle permutation flow-shop scheduling problems

A novel Discrete Differential Evolution (DDE) algorithm is proposed in this paper for solving no-idle permutation flow-shop scheduling problems with maximum completion time (makespan) criterion. Firstly, individuals of the DDE algorithm are represented as discrete job permutations, and new mutation and crossover operators are developed. Secondly, a local search algorithm based on insert neighbourhood is embedded in the DDE algorithm to balance the exploration and exploitation and to enhance the local searching ability. In addition, we present two simple approaches to calculate makespan and a speed-up method for insert neighbourhood to improve the efficiency of the whole algorithm. Computational simulations and comparisons based on some well-known benchmarks demonstrate that the DDE algorithm is not only superior to the improved greedy and Kalczynski-Kamburowski heuristics in terms of searching quality, but also superior to the particle swarm optimisation and differential evolution algorithms according to searching quality, robustness and efficiency. [Received 9 July 2007; Revised 10 October 2007; Accepted 30 October 2007]