Nonlinear continuous multi-response problems: a novel two-phase hybrid genetic based metaheuristic

Generally the most real world production systems are tackling several different responses and the problem is optimizing these responses concurrently. This study strives to present a new two-phase hybrid genetic based metaheuristic for optimizing nonlinear continuous multi-response problems. Premature convergence and getting stuck in local optima, which makes the algorithm time consuming, are common problems dealing with genetic algorithms (GAs). So we hybridize GA with a clustering approach and particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) to make a balanced relationship between time consuming and premature termination. The proposed algorithm also tries to find Ideal Points (IPs) for response functions. IPs are considered as improvement measures that determine when PSO should start. PSO based local search exploit Pareto archive solutions to enhance performance of the algorithm by expanding the search space. Since there is no standard benchmark in this field, we use two case studies from distinguished paper in multi-response optimization and compare the results with some of the mentioned algorithms in the literature. Results show the outperformance of the proposed algorithm than all of them. (C) 2010 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.