Browsing by Author "Garcia-Hernandez, L."
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- Addressing Unequal Area Facility Layout Problems with the Coral Reef Optimization algorithm with Substrate LayersPublication . Garcia-Hernandez, L.; Garcia-Hernandez, J. A.; Salas-Morera, L.; Carmona-Munoz, C.; Alghamdi, N. S.; Valente de Oliveira, José; Salcedo-Sanz, S.The Unequal Area Facility Layout Problem (UA-FLP) is a relevant task in industrial manufacturing, in which the disposition of a number of facilities (or departments) in a manufacturing system must be obtained, under several optimization criteria and different constraints. The UA-FLP is a hard optimization problem, in which traditional optimization techniques do not obtain good results. Thus, it has been successfully tackled with different heuristics and meta-heuristics in the last years. In this work we address the UA-FLP with a multi-method ensemble approach, the Coral Reefs Optimization algorithm with Substrate Layers (CRO-SL). It is a novel multi-method evolutionary algorithm that encourages the evolution of several searching procedures at the same time over a single population. The CRO-SL has been previously applied to very difficult optimization problems, obtaining excellent performance. In this case, we adapt the CRO-SL to the UA-FLP, by means of increasing the diversity generation within the algorithm, which is helpful to improve the exploration of the searching space, avoiding to fall into local minima. Specifically, we propose to include several reproduction mechanisms (adapted to the UA-FLP) within each substrate of the algorithm, which will highly increase the diversity generation in the CRO-SL. An exhaustive experimental study of the CRO-SL performance in a large number of UA-FLP instances is carried out, including a comparison with the state-of-the-art algorithms for this problem. We will show the ability of the CRO-SL to reach or surpass the best-known solutions in most of the tested UA-FLP cases.
- Applying the coral reefs optimization algorithm for solving unequal area facility layout problemsPublication . Garcia-Hernandez, L.; Salas-Morera, L.; Garcia-Hernandez, J. A.; Salcedo-Sanz, S.; Valente de Oliveira, JOSÉCoral Reefs Optimization (CRO) is a recently proposed evolutionary-type algorithm which has shown promising results to tackle many complex optimization problems. This paper discusses the performance of this meta-heuristic in Unequal Area Facility Layout Problems (UA-FLPs). The UA-FLP is an important problem in industrial production, which considers a rectangular region and a set of rectangular facilities. These facilities must be allocated in the plant in the most adequate way satisfying certain constraints. The Flexible Bay Structure has been selected in order to represent solutions for the UA-FLP in the proposed CRO algorithm. In this paper, we detail the implementation of the algorithm and provide the results of different tests in several UA-FLP instances with different size and setting. The obtained results confirm the excellent performance of the proposed algorithm in solving UA-FLPs, improving alternative algorithms devoted to this problem in the literature.