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Reference point based evolutionary multi-objective optimization with dynamic resampling for production systems improvement

Amos H.C. Ng (University of Skövde, Skövde, Sweden)
Florian Siegmund (University of Skövde, Skövde, Sweden)
Kalyanmoy Deb (Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA)

Journal of Systems and Information Technology

ISSN: 1328-7265

Article publication date: 8 November 2018

Issue publication date: 30 November 2018

218

Abstract

Purpose

Stochastic simulation is a popular tool among practitioners and researchers alike for quantitative analysis of systems. Recent advancement in research on formulating production systems improvement problems into multi-objective optimizations has provided the possibility to predict the optimal trade-offs between improvement costs and system performance, before making the final decision for implementation. However, the fact that stochastic simulations rely on running a large number of replications to cope with the randomness and obtain some accurate statistical estimates of the system outputs, has posed a serious issue for using this kind of multi-objective optimization in practice, especially with complex models. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the performance enhancements of a reference point based evolutionary multi-objective optimization algorithm in practical production systems improvement problems, when combined with various dynamic re-sampling mechanisms.

Design/methodology/approach

Many algorithms consider the preferences of decision makers to converge to optimal trade-off solutions faster. There also exist advanced dynamic resampling procedures to avoid wasting a multitude of simulation replications to non-optimal solutions. However, very few attempts have been made to study the advantages of combining these two approaches to further enhance the performance of computationally expensive optimizations for complex production systems. Therefore, this paper proposes some combinations of preference-based guided search with dynamic resampling mechanisms into an evolutionary multi-objective optimization algorithm to lower both the computational cost in re-sampling and the total number of simulation evaluations.

Findings

This paper shows the performance enhancements of the reference-point based algorithm, R-NSGA-II, when augmented with three different dynamic resampling mechanisms with increasing degrees of statistical sophistication, namely, time-based, distance-rank and optimal computing buffer allocation, when applied to two real-world production system improvement studies. The results have shown that the more stochasticity that the simulation models exert, the more the statistically advanced dynamic resampling mechanisms could significantly enhance the performance of the optimization process.

Originality/value

Contributions of this paper include combining decision makers’ preferences and dynamic resampling procedures; performance evaluations on two real-world production system improvement studies and illustrating statistically advanced dynamic resampling mechanism is needed for noisy models.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

This work was partially financed by the Knowledge Foundation (KKS), Sweden, through the Blixt-Sim project (2011-2014). The authors gratefully acknowledge their provision of research funding and thank the industrial partners, Volvo Car Corporation and AB Volvo, for their collaborative supports during the project.

Citation

Ng, A.H.C., Siegmund, F. and Deb, K. (2018), "Reference point based evolutionary multi-objective optimization with dynamic resampling for production systems improvement", Journal of Systems and Information Technology, Vol. 20 No. 4, pp. 489-512. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSIT-10-2017-0084

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited

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