Investigation of Ant System parameter interactions by using design of experiments for job-shop scheduling problems


Figlali N., ÖZKALE C., Engin O., FIĞLALI A.

COMPUTERS & INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING, vol.56, no.2, pp.538-559, 2009 (SCI-Expanded) identifier identifier

  • Publication Type: Article / Article
  • Volume: 56 Issue: 2
  • Publication Date: 2009
  • Doi Number: 10.1016/j.cie.2007.06.001
  • Journal Name: COMPUTERS & INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING
  • Journal Indexes: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Scopus
  • Page Numbers: pp.538-559
  • Keywords: Ant Systems, Parameter optimization, Design of experiments, Job-shop scheduling, COLONY OPTIMIZATION ALGORITHM, RELIABILITY OPTIMIZATION, CLUSTERING APPROACH, GENETIC ALGORITHMS, ALLOCATION PROBLEM, LAYOUT PROBLEM, SEARCH, TIME, REDUCTION, SELECTION
  • Kocaeli University Affiliated: Yes

Abstract

In recent years, one of the most important and promising research fields has been metaheuristics to find optimal or near-optimal solutions for NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. Improving the quality of the solution or the solution time is basic research area on metaheuristics. Modifications of the existing ones or creation of hybrid approaches are the focus of these efforts. Another area of improving the solution quality of metaheuristics is finding the optimal combination of algorithm control parameters. This is usually done by design of experiments or one-at-a-time approach in genetic algorithms, simulated annealing and similar metaheuristics. We observe that, in studies which use Ant Colonies Optimization (ACO) as an optimization technique; the levels of control parameters are determined by some non-systematic initial experiments and the interactions of the parameters are not studied yet.