The new efficient hierarchy combination encoding method of evolution strategies for production allocation problems

The production allocation problem focuses on allocating the output of individual plants in a multinational company among markets. The production allocation model aims to minimize the costs of a multinational company subject to the capacity constraints and market demand. This study applies evolution strategies to solve the production allocation problem. We proposed a new efficient encoding method, which can significantly reduce the search space of solutions and obtain a high performance and optimal solutions. To avoid invalid chromosome happened during evolution strategies procedures, a specialized mutation operation is simultaneously proposed herein. Computational results indicate that the efficient combination encoding of evolution strategies performs very well. Our results further demonstrate that the solutions obtained by this approach are always efficient.