An Effective PSO-Based Memetic Algorithm for Flow Shop Scheduling
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: An Effective PSO-Based Hybrid Algorithm for Multiobjective Permutation Flow Shop Scheduling
abstract: This paper proposes a hybrid algorithm based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) for a multiobjective permutation flow shop scheduling problem, which is a typical NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem with strong engineering backgrounds. Not only does the proposed multiobjective algorithm (named MOPSO) apply the parallel evolution mechanism of PSO characterized by individual improvement, population cooperation, and competition to effectively perform exploration but it also utilizes several adaptive local search methods to perform exploitation. First, to make PSO suitable for solving scheduling problems, a ranked-order value (ROV) rule based on a random key technique to convert the continuous position values of particles to job permutations is presented. Second, a multiobjective local search based on the Nawaz-Enscore-Ham heuristic is applied to good solutions with a specified probability to enhance the exploitation ability. Third, to enrich the searching behavior and to avoid premature convergence, a multiobjective local search based on simulated annealing with multiple different neighborhoods is designed, and an adaptive meta-Lamarckian learning strategy is employed to decide which neighborhood will be used. Due to the fusion of multiple different searching operations, good solutions approximating the real Pareto front can be obtained. In addition, MOPSO adopts a random weighted linear sum function to aggregate multiple objectives to a single one for solution evaluation and for guiding the evolution process in the multiobjective sense. Due to the randomness of weights, searching direction can be enriched, and solutions with good diversity can be obtained. Simulation results and comparisons based on a variety of instances demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and robustness of the proposed hybrid algorithm.

title: Analog circuit optimization system based on hybrid evolutionary algorithms
abstract: This paper investigates a hybrid evolutionary-based design system for automated sizing of analog integrated circuits (ICs). A new algorithm, called competitive co-evolutionary differential evolution (CODE), is proposed to design analog ICs with practical user-defined specifications. On the basis of the combination of HSPICE and MATLAB, the system links circuit performances, evaluated through electrical simulation, to the optimization system in the MATLAB environment, once a circuit topology is selected. The system has been tested by typical and hard-to-design cases, such as complex analog blocks with stringent design requirements. The results show that the design specifications are closely met, even in highly-constrained situations. Comparisons with available methods like genetic algorithms and differential evolution, which use static penalty functions to handle design constraints, have also been carried out, showing that the proposed algorithm offers important advantages in terms of optimization quality and robustness. Moreover, the algorithm is shown to be efficient.

title: Designing Neural Networks Using PSO-Based Memetic Algorithm
abstract: This paper proposes an effective particle swarm optimization (PSO) based memetic algorithm (MA) for designing artificial neural network. In the proposed PSO-based MA (PSOMA), not only the evolutionary searching mechanism of PSO characterized by individual improvement plus population cooperation and competition is applied to perform the global search, but also several adaptive high-performance faster training algorithms are employed to enhance the local search, so that the exploration and exploitation abilities of PSOMA can be well balanced. Moreover, an effective adaptive Meta-Lamarckian learning strategy is employed to decide which local search method to be used so as to prevent the premature convergence and concentrate computing effort on promising neighbor solutions. Simulation results and comparisons demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed PSOMA.

title: An Intelligent Differential Evolution Algorithm for Designing Trading-Ratio System of Water Market
abstract: As a novel optimization technique, neural network based optimization has gained much attention and some applications during the past decade. To enhance the performance of Differential Evolution Algorithm (DEA), which is an evolutionary computation technique through individual improvement plus population cooperation and competition, an intelligent Differential Evolution Algorithm (IDEA) is proposed by incorporating neural network based search behaviors into classic DEA. Firstly, DEA operators are used for exploration by updating individuals so as to maintain the diversity of population and speedup the search process. Secondly, a multi-layer feed-forward neural network is employed for local exploitation to avoid being trapped in local optima and improve the convergence of the IDEA. Simulation results and comparisons based on well-known benchmarks and optimal designing of trading-ratio system for water market demonstrate that the IDEA can effectively enhance the searching efficiency and greatly improve the searching quality.

title: Hybrid differential evolution for noisy optimization
abstract: A robust hybrid algorithm named DEOSA for function optimization problems is investigated in this paper. In recent years, differential evolution (DE) has attracted wide research and effective applications in various fields. However, to the best of our knowledge, most of the available works did not consider noisy and uncertain environments in practical optimization problems. This paper focuses on a robust DE, which can adapt to noisy environment in real applications. By combining the advantages of DE algorithm, the optimal computing budget allocation (OCBA) technique and simulated annealing (SA) algorithm, a robust hybrid DE approach DEOSA is proposed. In DEOSA, the population-based search mechanism of DE is applied for well exploration and exploitation, and the OCBA technique is used to allocate limited sampling budgets to provide reliable evaluation and identification for good individuals. Meanwhile, SA is also applied in the hybrid approach to maintain the diversity of the population, in order to alleviate the negative influences on greedy selection mechanism of DE brought by the noises. DEOSA is tested by well-known benchmark problems with noise and the effect of noise magnitude is also investigated. The comparisons to several commonly used techniques for optimization in noisy environment are also carried out. The results and comparisons demonstrate the superiority of DEOSA.

title: Joint estimation of image and coil sensitivities in parallel MRI
abstract: Parallel magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) using multichannel receiver coils has emerged as an effective tool to reduce imaging time in various dynamic imaging applications. However, there are still a number of image reconstruction issues that have not been fully addressed, thereby limiting the level of speed enhancement achievable with the technology. This paper considers the inaccuracy of coil sensitivities in conventional reconstruction methods such as SENSE, and reformulates the image reconstruction problem as a joint estimation of the coil sensitivities and the desired image, which is solved by an iterative algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method especially when large acceleration factors are used

title: Improving an Association Rule Based Classifier
abstract: Existing classification algorithms in machine learning mainly use heuristic search to find a subset of regularities in data for classification. In the past few years, extensive research was done in the database community on learning rules using exhaustive search under the name of association rule mining. Although the whole set of rules may not be used directly for accurate classification, effective classifiers have been built using the rules. This paper aims to improve such an exhaustive search based classification system CBA (Classification Based on Associations). The main strength of this system is that it is able to use the most accurate rules for classification. However, it also has weaknesses. This paper proposes two new techniques to deal with these weaknesses. This results in remarkably accurate classifiers. Experiments on a set of 34 benchmark datasets show that on average the new techniques reduce the error of CBA by 17% and is superior to CBA on 26 of the 34 datasets. They reduce the error of C4.5 by 19%, and improve performance on 29 datasets. Similar good results are also achieved against RIPPER, LB and a Naive-Bayes classifier.

title: Towards a Multi-agent Model for Planning and Design of Exposition Spaces
abstract: In this paper we present a multi-agent model for supporting the planning, design and organisation of exposition spaces. The model and its related software implementation simulates the behaviour of agents during their visit of an exposition with the objective to evaluate their overall comfort and satisfaction. It takes into account both the architectural and environmental aspects as well as the interaction among agents simulating possible phenomena of crowding and other forms of competition. The representation of the relevant phenomena in the model relies on the coexistence of both vector and cellular (raster) simulation approaches, taking into account the trade-off between the computational efficiency and the need for precision.

title: Hybrid Algorithm Combining Ant Colony Algorithm with Genetic Algorithm for Continuous Domain
abstract: Ant colony algorithm is a kind of new heuristic biological modeling method which has the ability of parallel processing and global searching. By use of the properties of ant colony algorithm and genetic algorithm, the hybrid algorithm which adopts genetic algorithm to distribute the original pheromone is proposed to solve the continuous optimization problem. Several solutions are obtained using the ant colony algorithm through pheromone accumulation and renewal. Finally, by using crossover and mutation operation of genetic algorithm, some effective solutions are obtained. The results of experiments show better performances of the new algorithm based on six continuous test functions compared with the methods available in literature.

title: An Adaptive Schedule Medium Access Control for Wireless Sensor Networks
abstract: Many media access control (MAC) protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) such as sensor MAC (S-MAC) and carrier sense multiple access with minimum preamble sampling (CSMA-MPS) exploit listen/sleep cycles to conserve energy. The cycles of nodes influence the network performances such as energy efficiency, packet latency and throughput in WSNs. In this paper, an adaptive schedule medium access control (AS-MAC) for WSNs is presented. AS-MAC introduces the adaptation of the cycles in MAC layer to the data traffic. The effect of the protocol is that it can decrease the latency, improve the throughput and energy efficiency when traffic is dynamic. We also compare AS-MAC with S-MAC and CSMA-MPS through simulations and the results show it has better performances than the former protocols.