Title: Enriched artificial bee colony metaheuristic for hierarchical goal programming engineering design problems

Authors: Saima Dhouib; Souhail Dhouib; Habib Chabchoub

Addresses: Logistic Genie Industrial and Quality Research Laboratory, Sfax University, Sfax, Tunisia ' Department of Industrial management, Higher Institute of Industrial Management, Sfax University, Sfax, Tunisia ' Department of Quantitative Methods, Faculty of Management and Economics Sciences, Sfax University, Sfax, Tunisia

Abstract: In this paper, a standard artificial bee colony (ABC) metaheuristic was enriched to optimise hierarchical goal programming (GP) engineering design problems. The proposed method was first adapted to support the GP by means of minimising deviations from fixed goals, and then enriched by the great deluge metaheuristic, especially in the onlooker bee phase, in order to increase its local search ability. The proposed metaheuristic is called great deluge artificial bee colony (GD-ABC). Experiments on four engineering design problems showed that the proposed GD-ABC metaheuristic converges rapidly and efficiently to solve those problems. The nonparametric Mann-Whitney U test was used to prove the comparison.

Keywords: artificial bee colony; ABC; engineering design; hierarchical goal programming; great deluge algorithm; metaheuristics; multi-objective optimisation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMHEUR.2016.081136

International Journal of Metaheuristics, 2016 Vol.5 No.3/4, pp.173 - 192

Received: 24 Apr 2015
Accepted: 21 Dec 2015
Published online: 24 Dec 2016 *

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