Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization for Flow Shop Scheduling with Stochastic Processing Time
The stochastic flow shop scheduling with uncertain processing time is a typical NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem and represents an important area in production scheduling, which is difficult because of inaccurate objective estimation, huge search space, and multiple local minima. As a novel evolutionary technique, particle swarm optimization (PSO) has gained much attention and wide applications for both function and combinatorial problems, but there is no research on PSO for stochastic scheduling cases. In this paper, a class of PSO approach with simulated annealing (SA) and hypothesis test (HT), namely PSOSAHT is proposed for stochastic flow shop scheduling with uncertain processing time with respect to the makespan criterion (i.e. minimizing the maximum completion time). Simulation results demonstrate the feasibility, effectiveness and robustness of the proposed hybrid algorithm. Meanwhile, the effects of noise magnitude and number of evaluation on searching performances are also investigated.

title: Manufacturing Grid: Needs, Concept, and Architecture
abstract: As a new approach, grid technology is rapidly used in scientific computing, large-scale data management, and collaborative work. But in the field of manufacturing, the application of grid is just at the beginning. The paper proposes the concept of manufacturing. The needs, definition and architecture of manufacturing gird are discussed, which explains why needs manufacturing grid, what is manufacturing grid and how to construct a manufacturing grid system.

title: An Effective PSO-Based Memetic Algorithm for Flow Shop Scheduling
abstract: This paper proposes an effective particle swarm optimization (PSO)-based memetic algorithm (MA) for the permutation flow shop scheduling problem (PFSSP) with the objective to minimize the maximum completion time, which is a typical non-deterministic polynomial-time (NP) hard combinatorial optimization problem. In the proposed PSO-based MA (PSOMA), both PSO-based searching operators and some special local searching operators are designed to balance the exploration and exploitation abilities. In particular, the PSOMA applies the evolutionary searching mechanism of PSO, which is characterized by individual improvement, population cooperation, and competition to effectively perform exploration. On the other hand, the PSOMA utilizes several adaptive local searches to perform exploitation. First, to make PSO suitable for solving PFSSP, a ranked-order value rule based on random key representation is presented to convert the continuous position values of particles to job permutations. Second, to generate an initial swarm with certain quality and diversity, the famous Nawaz-Enscore-Ham (NEH) heuristic is incorporated into the initialization of population. Third, to balance the exploration and exploitation abilities, after the standard PSO-based searching operation, a new local search technique named NEH_1 insertion is probabilistically applied to some good particles selected by using a roulette wheel mechanism with a specified probability. Fourth, to enrich the searching behaviors and to avoid premature convergence, a simulated annealing (SA)-based local search with multiple different neighborhoods is designed and incorporated into the PSOMA. Meanwhile, an effective adaptive meta-Lamarckian learning strategy is employed to decide which neighborhood to be used in SA-based local search. Finally, to further enhance the exploitation ability, a pairwise-based local search is applied after the SA-based search. Simulation results based on benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the PSOMA. Additionally, the effects of some parameters on optimization performances are also discussed

title: Constrained Nonlinear State Estimation - A Differential Evolution Based Moving Horizon Approach
abstract: A solution is proposed to estimate the states in the nonlinear discrete time system. Moving Horizon Estimation (MHE) is used to obtain the approximated states by minimizing a criterion that is the Euclidean form of the difference between the estimated outputs and the measured ones over a finite time horizon. The differential evolution (DE) algorithm is incorporated into the implementation of MHE in order to solve the optimization problem which is presented as a nonlinear programming problem due to the constraints. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated in simulated systems that have appeared in the moving horizon estimation literature.

title: A New Performance Evaluation Model and AHP-Based Analysis Method in Service-Oriented Workflow
abstract: In service-oriented architecture, services and workflows are closely related so that the research on service-oriented workflow attracts the attention of academia. Because of the loosely-coupled, autonomic and dynamic nature of service, the operation and performance evaluation of workflow meet some challenges, such as how to judge the quality of service (QoS) and what is the relation between QoS and workflow performance. In this paper we are going to address these challenges. First the definition of service is proposed, and the characteristics and operation mechanism of service-oriented workflow are presented. Then a service-oriented workflow performance evaluation model is described which combines the performance of the business system and IT system. The key performance indicators (KPI) are also depicted with their formal representation. Finally the improved Analytic Hierarchy Process is brought forward to analyze the correlation between different KPIs and select services.

title: DE and NLP Based QPLS Algorithm
abstract: As a novel evolutionary computing technique, Differential Evolution (DE) has been considered to be an effective optimization method for complex optimization problems, and achieved many successful applications in engineering. In this paper, a new algorithm of Quadratic Partial Least Squares (QPLS) based on Nonlinear Programming (NLP) is presented. And DE is used to solve the NLP so as to calculate the optimal input weights and the parameters of inner relationship. The simulation results based on the soft measurement of diesel oil solidifying point on a real crude distillation unit demonstrate that the superiority of the proposed algorithm to linear PLS and QPLS which is based on Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) in terms of fitting accuracy and computational costs.

title: Concurrent Discretization of Multiple Attributes
abstract: Better decision trees can be learnt by merging continuous values into intervals. Merging of values, however, could introduce inconsistencies to the data, or information loss. When it is desired to maintain a certain consistency, interval mergings in one attribute could disable those in another attribute. This interaction raises the issue of determining the order of mergings. We consider a globally greedy heuristic that selects the “best” merging from all continuous attributes at each step. We present an implementation of the heuristic in which the best merging is determined in a time independent of the number of possible mergings. Experiments show that intervals produced by the heuristic lead to improved decision trees.

title: V-Miner: using enhanced parallel coordinates to mine product design and test data
abstract: Analyzing data to find trends, correlations, and stable patterns is an important task in many industrial applications. This paper proposes a new technique based on parallel coordinate visualization. Previous work on parallel coordinate methods has shown that they are effective only when variables that are correlated and/or show similar patterns are displayed adjacently. Although current parallel coordinate tools allow the user to manually rearrange the order of variables, this process is very time-consuming when the number of variables is large. Automated assistance is required. This paper introduces an edit-distance based technique to rearrange variables so that interesting change patterns can be easily detected visually. The Visual Miner (V-Miner) software includes both automated methods for visualizing common patterns and a query tool that enables the user to describe specific target patterns to be mined or displayed by the system. In addition, the system can filter data according to rules sets imported from other data mining tools. This feature was found very helpful in practice, because it enables decision makers to visually identify interesting rules and data segments for further analysis or data mining. This paper begins with an introduction to the proposed techniques and the V-Miner system. Next, a case study illustrates how V-Miner has been used at Motorola to guide product design and test decisions.

title: Scheduling via reinforcement
abstract: Scheduling of a job shop in the presence of limited resources is a challenging decision making process. It is a problem of allocation of different resources to meet various shop needs (or to satisfy the constraints). Past research has had only limited success in properly handling this resource problem. In this paper a detailed analysis of the scheduling process, within an AI framework, is proposed and this highlights the deficiencies in current techniques. It is suggested that the central problem is how to have a global perspective in the scheduling process. In order to deal with the underlying problem, the concept of ‘reinforcement planning’ is proposed. This method builds a reinforcement schedule and uses it to refine out a detailed schedule by inter-level analysis and communication. Based on this idea a scheduling system called RESS-I has been implemented to automatically construct the job shop schedule.

title: Hybrid Ant Colony Algorithm and Its Application on Function Optimization
abstract: A new hybrid ant colony algorithm was proposed. Firstly, weight factor was introduced to the binary ant colony algorithm, and then we obtained a new probability by combining probability model of Population based incremental learning (PBIL) with transfer probability of ants pheromone . The new population are produced by probability model of PBIL, transfer probability of ants pheromone and the probability of proposed algorithm so that population polymorphism is ensured and the optimal convergence rate and the ability of breaking away from the local minima are improved. Optimization simulation results based on the benchmark test functions show that the hybrid algorithm has higher convergence rate and stability than binary ant colony algorithm (BACA) and Population based incremental learning (PBIL).

title: The design of nonuniform-band maximally decimated filter banks
abstract: A design method for nonuniform-band maximally decimated filter banks is presented. It is based on the quadrature mirror filter (QMF) design method and allows the direct frequency domain design of two-band filter banks having arbitrary rational decimation ratios. The numerical design of nonuniform-band filter banks is achieved using a simple structure in which elementary modulators are used in the highpass channel to obtain almost-perfect reconstruction.<<ETX>>