Optimisation of interacting production stations using a Constructive Cooperative Coevolutionary approach

Simulation-based optimisation carries the burden of computationally expensive fitness calculations. It is very often used to tackle large-scale optimisation problems with a relatively high level of complexity. Therefore, it is of interest to have optimisation techniques dedicated to simulation-based optimisation. This paper proposes a simulation-based optimisation approach, called Constructive Cooperative Coevolutionary (C³) search procedure, to optimise the control of interacting production stations. An optimisation algorithm is embedded in the C³ search procedure to optimise subproblems separately. It includes a novel constructive heuristic that creates a feasible solution for the considered problem efficiently. It also incorporates an extended version of the existing cooperative coevolutionary method that can handle large-scale optimisation problems. Furthermore, this paper presents a case study considering a sheet metal press line as an example of interacting production stations. In this case study, the performance of the proposed C³ search procedure is evaluated and compared with other optimisation algorithms. This shows that the C³ search procedure is able to successfully optimise the press line within a given number of fitness calculations, outperforming existing algorithms. Also, it is shown that C³ can be embedded with either stochastic or deterministic optimisation algorithms, without sacrificing performance.