Group-individual multi-mode cooperative teaching-learning-based optimization algorithm and an industrial engineering application

Abstract

This paper modifies the original Teaching-Learning-based Optimization (TLBO) algorithm to present a novel Group-Individual Multi-Mode Cooperative Teaching-Learning-based Optimization (CTLBO) algorithm. This algorithm introduces a new preparation phase before the teaching and learning phases and applies multiple teacher-learner cooperation strategies in teaching and learning processes. In the preparation phase, teacher-learner interaction and teacher self-learning mechanism are applied. In the teaching phase, class-teaching and performance-based group-teaching operators are applied. In the learning phase, neighbor learning, student self-learning and team-learning strategies are mixed together to form three operators. Experiments indicate that CTLBO has significant improvement in accuracy and convergence ability compared with original TLBO in solving large scale problems and outperforms other compared variants of TLBO in literature and other 9 meta-heuristic algorithms. A large-scale industrial engineering problem—warehouse materials inventory optimization problem is taken as application case, comparison results show that CTLBO can effectively solve the large-scale real problem with 1000 decision variables, while the accuracies of TLBO and other meta-heuristic algorithm are far lower than CLTBO, revealing that CTLBO can far outperform other algorithms. CTLBO is an excellent algorithm for solving large scale complex optimization issues.