Evolutionary Computing in Advanced Manufacturing

A timely and important volume that coherently presents and explains evolutionary computing in the context of manufacturing problems. This cutting-edge book covers emerging, evolutionary, and nature-inspired optimization techniques in the field of advanced manufacturing. The complexity of real-life advanced manufacturing problems often cannot be solved by traditional engineering or computational methods. As a result, researchers and practitioners have proposed and developed in recent years new strands of advanced, intelligent techniques and methodologies. Evolutionary computing approaches are introduced in the context of a wide range of manufacturing activities, and through the examination of practical problems and their solutions, readers will gain confidence to apply these powerful computing solutions. The initial chapters introduce and discuss the well established evolutionary algorithm, to help readers to understand the basic building blocks and steps required to successfully implement their own solutions to real-life advanced manufacturing problems. In the later chapters, modified and improved versions of evolutionary algorithms are discussed. Evolutionary Computing in Advanced Manufacturing Provides readers with a solid basis for understanding the development of mathematical models for production and manufacturing-related issues Explicates the mathematical models and various evolutionary algorithms such as Genetic Algorithm (GA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Ant Colony Algorithm (ACO) Helps scholars, researchers, and practitioners in understanding both the fundamentals and advanced aspects of computational intelligence in production and manufacturing The volume will interest manufacturing engineers in academia and industry as well as IT/Computer Science specialists involved in manufacturing. Students at MSc and PhD levels will find it very rewarding as well. All large and medium-sized corporations in manufacturing or manufacturing-related industries with complex planning?problems will find this book very useful.