Evolutionary Process for Engineering Optimization in Manufacturing Applications: Fine Brushworks of Single-Objective to Multi-Objective/Many-Objective Optimization

Abstract

Single-objective to multi-objective/many-objective optimization (SMO) is a new paradigm in the evolutionary transfer optimization (ETO), since there are only “1 + 4” pioneering works on SMOs so far, that is, “1” is continuous and is firstly performed by Professors L. Feng and H.D. Wang, and “4” are firstly proposed by our group for discrete cases. As a new computational paradigm, theoretical insights into SMOs are relatively rare now. Therefore, we present a proposal on the fine brushworks of SMOs for theoretical advances here, which is based on a case study of a permutation flow shop scheduling problem (PFSP) in manufacturing systems via lenses of building blocks, transferring gaps, auxiliary task and asynchronous rhythms. The empirical studies on well-studied benchmarks enrich the rough strokes of SMOs and guide future designs and practices in ETO based manufacturing scheduling, and even ETO based evolutionary processes for engineering optimization in other cases.