An evolutionary programming approach to mixed-variable optimization problems

Many engineering optimization problems frequently encounter discrete variables as well as continuous variables and the presence of nonlinear discrete variables considerably adds to the solution complexity. Very few of the existing methods can find a globally optimal solution when the objective funct...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied mathematical modelling Vol. 24; no. 12; pp. 931 - 942
Main Authors: Cao, Y.J., Jiang, L., Wu, Q.H.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier Inc 01.10.2000
Subjects:
ISSN:0307-904X
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Many engineering optimization problems frequently encounter discrete variables as well as continuous variables and the presence of nonlinear discrete variables considerably adds to the solution complexity. Very few of the existing methods can find a globally optimal solution when the objective functions are non-convex and non-differentiable. In this paper, we present a mixed-variable evolutionary programming (MVEP) technique for solving these nonlinear optimization problems which contain integer, discrete, zero-one and continuous variables. The MVEP provides an improvement in global search reliability in a mixed-variable space and converges steadily to a good solution. An approach to handle various kinds of variables and constraints is discussed. Some examples of mixed-variable optimization problems in the literature are tested, which demonstrate that the proposed approach is superior to current methods for finding the best solution, in terms of both solution quality and algorithm robustness.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-2
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-1
content type line 23
ISSN:0307-904X
DOI:10.1016/S0307-904X(00)00026-3