EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHMS FOR CONSTRAINED ENGINEERING PROBLEMS

Evolutionary computation techniques have been receiving increasing att ention regarding their potential as optimization techniques for comple x problems. Recently these techniques were applied in the area of indu strial engineering; the most-known applications include scheduling and sequencing in manufacturing systems, computer-aided design, facility layout and location problems, distribution and transportation problems , and many others. Industrial engineering problems usually are quite h ard to solve due to a high complexity of the objective functions and a significant number of problem-specific constraints; often an algorith m to solve such problems requires incorporation of some heuristic meth ods. In this paper we concentrate on constraint handling heuristics fo r evolutionary computation techniques. This general discussion is foll owed by three test case studies: truss structure optimization problem, design of a composite laminated plate, and the unit commitment proble m. These are typical highly constrained engineering problems and the m ethods discussed here are directly transferrable to industrial enginee ring problems. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd