An Effective PSO-Based Hybrid Algorithm for Multiobjective Permutation Flow Shop Scheduling
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: Particle swarm optimization for function optimization in noisy environment
abstract: As a novel evolutionary searching technique, particle swarm optimization (PSO) has gained wide research and effective applications in the field of function optimization. However, to the best of our knowledge, most studies based on PSO are aimed at deterministic optimization problems. In this paper, the performance of PSO for function optimization in noisy environment is investigated, and an effective hybrid PSO approach named PSOOHT is proposed. In the PSOOHT, the population-based search mechanism of PSO is applied for well exploration and exploitation, and the optimal computing budget allocation (OCBA) technique is used to allocate limited sampling budgets to provide reliable evaluation and identification for good particles. Meanwhile, hypothesis test (HT) is also applied in the hybrid approach to reserve good particles and to maintain the diversity of the swarm as well. Numerical simulations based on several well-known function benchmarks with noise are carried out, and the effect of noise magnitude is also investigated as well. The results and comparisons demonstrate the superiority of PSOOHT in terms of searching quality and robustness.

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 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: A service-oriented business performance evaluation model and the performance-aware service selection method
abstract: In service-oriented architecture, services and business processes are closely related and therefore the research on service-oriented business process (SOBP) attracts the attention of academia as well as industry. Because of the loosely coupled, autonomic and dynamic nature of services, the operation and the performance evaluation of business process meet some challenges, such as the definition of the key performance indicators (KPIs) and the alignment of business performance and IT performance. In this paper, we address these challenges. First, the definition and the characteristics of an SOBP are presented with a motivating scenario. Then a service-oriented business performance evaluation model is described, which integrates the performance of strategy layer, business process layer, business activity layer, service composition layer and IT infrastructure layer. The KPIs corresponding to each layer are also defined with their formal representations. The qualitative and quantitative performance analysis methods, based on the proposed model, are presented, respectively. Finally, the improved analytic hierarchy process is explicated to calculate the correlation between different KPIs and select the most suitable service. An online-shopping example is taken to prove the soundness and the feasibility of the method.

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: Twi-Map Support Vector Machine for Multi-classification Problems
abstract: In this paper, a novel method called Twi-Map Support Vector Machines (TMSVM) for multi-classification problems is presented. Our ideas are as follows: Firstly, the training data set is mapped into a high-dimensional feature space. Secondly, we calculate the distances between the training data points and hyperplanes. Thirdly, we view the new vector consisting of the distances as new training data point. Finally, we map the new training data points into another high-dimensional feature space with the same kernel function and construct the optimal hyperplanes. In order to examine the training accuracy and the generalization performance of the proposed algorithm, One-against-One algorithm, Fuzzy Least Square Support Vector Machine (FLS-SVM) and the proposed algorithm are applied to five UCI data sets. Comparison results obtained by using three algorithms are given. The results show that the training accuracy and the testing one of the proposed algorithm are higher than those of One-against-One and FLS-SVM.

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: A combinational feature selection and ensemble neural network method for classification of gene expression data
abstract: BackgroundMicroarray experiments are becoming a powerful tool for clinical diagnosis, as they have the potential to discover gene expression patterns that are characteristic for a particular disease. To date, this problem has received most attention in the context of cancer research, especially in tumor classification. Various feature selection methods and classifier design strategies also have been generally used and compared. However, most published articles on tumor classification have applied a certain technique to a certain dataset, and recently several researchers compared these techniques based on several public datasets. But, it has been verified that differently selected features reflect different aspects of the dataset and some selected features can obtain better solutions on some certain problems. At the same time, faced with a large amount of microarray data with little knowledge, it is difficult to find the intrinsic characteristics using traditional methods. In this paper, we attempt to introduce a combinational feature selection method in conjunction with ensemble neural networks to generally improve the accuracy and robustness of sample classification.ResultsWe validate our new method on several recent publicly available datasets both with predictive accuracy of testing samples and through cross validation. Compared with the best performance of other current methods, remarkably improved results can be obtained using our new strategy on a wide range of different datasets.ConclusionsThus, we conclude that our methods can obtain more information in microarray data to get more accurate classification and also can help to extract the latent marker genes of the diseases for better diagnosis and treatment.

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: Extracting Web Data Using Instance-Based Learning
abstract: This paper studies structured data extraction from Web pages, e.g., online product description pages. Existing approaches to data extraction include wrapper induction and automatic methods. In this paper, we propose an instance-based learning method, which performs extraction by comparing each new instance (or page) to be extracted with labeled instances (or pages). The key advantage of our method is that it does not need an initial set of labeled pages to learn extraction rules as in wrapper induction. Instead, the algorithm is able to start extraction from a single labeled instance (or page). Only when a new page cannot be extracted does the page need labeling. This avoids unnecessary page labeling, which solves a major problem with inductive learning (or wrapper induction), i.e., the set of labeled pages may not be representative of all other pages. The instance-based approach is very natural because structured data on the Web usually follow some fixed templates and pages of the same template usually can be extracted using a single page instance of the template. The key issue is the similarity or distance measure. Traditional measures based on the Euclidean distance or text similarity are not easily applicable in this context because items to be extracted from different pages can be entirely different. This paper proposes a novel similarity measure for the purpose, which is suitable for templated Web pages. Experimental results with product data extraction from 1200 pages in 24 diverse Web sites show that the approach is surprisingly effective. It outperforms the state-of-the-art existing systems significantly.