Raymond Chiong

Sandeep Dhakal

Scheduling, planning and packing are ubiquitous problems that can be found in a wide range of real-world settings. These problems transpire in a large variety of forms, and have enormous socio-economic impact. For many years, significant work has been devoted to automating the processes of scheduling, planning and packing using different kinds of methods. However, poor scaling and the lack of flexibility of many of the conventional methods coupled with the fact that most of the real-world problems across the application areas of scheduling, planning and packing nowadays tend to be of large scale, dynamic and full of complex dependencies have made it necessary to tackle them in unconventional ways. This volume, "Natural Intelligence for Scheduling, Planning and Packing Problems", is a collection of numerous natural intelligence based approaches for solving various kinds of scheduling, planning and packing problems. It comprises 12 chapters which present many methods that draw inspiration from nature, such as evolutionary algorithms, neural-fuzzy system, particle swarm algorithms, ant colony optimisation, extremal optimisation, raindrop optimisation, and so on. Problems addressed by these chapters include freight transportation, job shop scheduling, flowshop scheduling, electrical load forecasting, vehicle routing, two-dimensional strip packing, network configuration and forest planning, among others. Along with solving these problems, the contributing authors present a lively discussion of the various aspects of the nature-inspired algorithms utilised, providing very useful and important new insights into the research areas.

Natural Intelligence for Scheduling, Planning and Packing Problems

Zbigniew Michalewicz

Thomas Weise

Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) are population-based, stochastic search algorithms that mimic natural evolution. Due to their ability to find excellent solutions for conventionally hard and dynamic problems within acceptable time, EAs have attracted interest from many researchers and practitioners in recent years. This book “Variants of Evolutionary Algorithms for Real-World Applications” aims to promote the practitioner’s view on EAs by providing a comprehensive discussion of how EAs can be adapted to the requirements of various applications in the real-world domains. It comprises 14 chapters, including an introductory chapter re-visiting the fundamental question of what an EA is and other chapters addressing a range of real-world problems such as production process planning, inventory system and supply chain network optimisation, task-based jobs assignment, planning for CNC-based work piece construction, mechanical/ship design tasks that involve runtime-intense simulations, data mining for the prediction of soil properties, automated tissue classification for MRI images, and database query optimisation, among others. These chapters demonstrate how different types of problems can be successfully solved using variants of EAs and how the solution approaches are constructed, in a way that can be understood and reproduced with little prior knowledge on optimisation.

Variants of Evolutionary Algorithms for Real-World Applications

Nature-Inspired Algorithms have been gaining much popularity in recent years due to the fact that many real-world optimisation problems have become increasingly large, complex and dynamic. The size and complexity of the problems nowadays require the development of methods and solutions whose efficiency is measured by their ability to find acceptable results within a reasonable amount of time, rather than an ability to guarantee the optimal solution. This volume 'Nature-Inspired Algorithms for Optimisation' is a collection of the latest state-of-the-art algorithms and important studies for tackling various kinds of optimisation problems. It comprises 18 chapters, including two introductory chapters which address the fundamental issues that have made optimisation problems difficult to solve and explain the rationale for seeking inspiration from nature. The contributions stand out through their novelty and clarity of the algorithmic descriptions and analyses, and lead the way to interesting and varied new applications.

Raymond Chiong

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