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Interactive preferences in multiobjective ant colony optimisation for assembly line balancing

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Abstract

In this contribution, we propose an interactive multicriteria optimisation framework for the time and space assembly line balancing problem. The framework allows decision maker interaction by means of reference points to obtain the most interesting non-dominated solutions. The principal components of the framework are the \(g\)-dominance preference scheme and a state-of-the-art memetic multiobjective ant colony optimisation approach. In addition, the framework includes a novel adaptive multi-colony mechanism to be able to handle the preferences in an interactive way. Results show how the multiobjective framework can interactively obtain the most useful solutions with higher convergence than previous a priori methods. The experimentation also makes use of original data of the Nissan Pathfinder engine and practical bounds to define industrially feasible solutions in a set of scenarios. By solving the problem in these scenarios, we show the search guidance advantages of using an interactive multiobjective ant colony optimisation method.

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Notes

  1. Originally, this TSALBP variant is referred as TSALBP-1/3 (Bautista and Pereira 2007).

  2. Please note that the space division and, therefore, the ants’ thresholds depend on the first Pareto front approximation and this front can vary among the 20 runs. For simplicity, we refer here to the most common thresholds of the runs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. European Centre for Soft Computing, Mieres, Spain

    Manuel Chica, Óscar Cordón & Sergio Damas

  2. DECSAI and CITIC-UGR, University of Granada, Granada, Spain

    Óscar Cordón

  3. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

    Joaquín Bautista

Authors
  1. Manuel Chica
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  2. Óscar Cordón
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  3. Sergio Damas
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  4. Joaquín Bautista
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Manuel Chica.

Additional information

Communicated by V. Loia.

This work has been supported by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad under project SOCOVIFI2 (TIN2012-38525-C02-01 and TIN2012-38525-C02-02), and under PROTHIUS-III: DPI2010-16759, both including EDRF funding.

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Chica, M., Cordón, Ó., Damas, S. et al. Interactive preferences in multiobjective ant colony optimisation for assembly line balancing. Soft Comput 19, 2891–2903 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-014-1451-1

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