Title
A block-based evolutionary algorithm for flow-shop scheduling problem
Abstract
Combinatorial problems like flow shop scheduling, travel salesman problem etc. get complicated and are difficult to solve when the problem size increases. To overcome this problem, we present a block-based evolutionary algorithm (BBEA) which will conduct evolutionary operations on a set of blocks instead of genes. BBEA includes the block mining and block recombination approaches. A block mining algorithm is developed to decompose a chromosome into a set of blocks and rest of genes. The block is with a fixed length and can be treated as a building block in forming a new chromosome later on. To guide the block mining process, a gene linkage probability matrix is defined that shows the linkage strength among genes. Therefore the blocks can be further evolved during the evolutionary processes using this matrix. In the block recombination approach, the blocks along with the rest of genes are recombined to form a new chromosome. This new evolutionary approach of BBEA is tested on a set of discrete problems. Experimental results show that BBEA is very competitive when compared with traditional GA, EA or ACGA and HGIA approaches and it can largely improve the performance of evolutionary algorithm and save a fair amount of computational times simultaneously.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1016/j.asoc.2013.07.018
Appl. Soft Comput.
Keywords
Field
DocType
evolutionary process,block mining,new chromosome,flow-shop scheduling problem,building block,block mining process,evolutionary operation,evolutionary algorithm,block mining algorithm,block-based evolutionary algorithm,block recombination approach,gene linkage,recombination
Mathematical optimization,Stochastic matrix,Combinatorial optimization problem,Evolutionary algorithm,Matrix (mathematics),Flow shop scheduling,Algorithm,Travelling salesman problem,Data mining algorithm,Evolutionary programming,Mathematics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
13
12
1568-4946
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
9
0.53
15
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Pei-Chann Chang11752109.32
Meng-Hui Chen2282.55
M. K. Tiwari31240115.22
Asif Sikandar Iquebal490.53