Constrained differential evolution using generalized opposition-based learning

Differential evolution (DE) is a well-known optimization approach to deal with nonlinear and complex optimization problems. However, many real-world optimization problems are constrained problems that involve equality and inequality constraints. DE with constraint handling techniques, named constrained differential evolution (CDE), can be used to solve constrained optimization problems. In this paper, we propose a new CDE framework that uses generalized opposition-based learning (GOBL), named GOBL-CDE. In GOBL-CDE, firstly, the transformed population is generated using general opposition-based learning in the population initialization. Secondly, the transformed population and the initial population are merged and only half of the best individuals are selected to compose the new initial population to proceed mutation, crossover, and selection. Lastly, based on a jumping probability, the transformed population is calculated again after generating new populations, and the fittest individuals are selected to compose new population from the union of the current population and the transformed population. The GOBL-CDE framework can be applied to most CDE variants. As examples, in this study, the framework is applied to two popular representative CDE variants, i.e., rank-iMDDE and \(\varepsilon \)DEag. Experiment results on 24 benchmark functions from CEC’2006 and 18 benchmark functions from CEC’2010 show that the proposed framework is an effective approach to enhance the performance of CDE algorithms.     

Chain-reaction solution update in MOEA/D and its effects on multi- and many-objective optimization

MOEA/D is one of the promising evolutionary algorithms for multi- and many-objective optimization. To improve the search performance of MOEA/D, this work focuses on the solution update method in the conventional MOEA/D and proposes its alternative, the chain-reaction solution update. The proposed method is designed to maintain and improve the variable (genetic) diversity in the population by avoiding duplication of solutions in the population. In addition, the proposed method determines the order of existing solutions to be updated depending on the location of each offspring in the objective space. Furthermore, when an existing solution in the population is replaced by a new offspring, the proposed method tries to reutilize the existing solution for other search directions by recursively performing the proposed chain-reaction update procedure. This work uses discrete knapsack and continuous WFG4 problems with 2–8 objectives. Experimental results using knapsack problems show the proposed chain-reaction update contributes to improving the search performance of MOEA/D by enhancing the diversity of solutions in the objective space. In addition, experimental results using WFG4 problems show that the search performance of MOEA/D can be further improved using the proposed method.     

Genetic programming for QoS-aware web service composition and selection

Web services, which can be described as functionality modules invoked over a network as part of a larger application are often used in software development. Instead of occasionally incorporating some of these services in an application, they can be thought of as fundamental building blocks that are combined in a process known as Web service composition. Manually creating compositions from a large number of candidate services is very time consuming, and developing techniques for achieving this objective in an automated manner becomes an active research field. One promising group of techniques encompasses evolutionary computing, which can effectively tackle the large search spaces characteristic of the composition problem. Therefore, this paper proposes the use of genetic programming for Web service composition, investigating three variations to ensure the creation of functionally correct solutions that are also optimised according to their quality of service. A variety of comparisons are carried out between these variations and two particle swarm optimisation approaches, with results showing that there is likely a trade-off between execution time and the quality of solutions when employing genetic programming and particle swarm optimisation. Even though genetic programming has a higher execution time for most datasets, the results indicate that it scales better than particle swarm optimisation.     

A projection-based decomposition for the scalability of evolvable hardware

Scalability is a main and urgent problem in evolvable hardware (EHW) field. For the design of large circuits, an EHW method with a decomposition strategy is able to successfully find a solution, but requires a large complexity and evolution time. This study aims to optimize the decomposition on large-scale circuits so that it provides a solution for the EHW method to scalability and improves the efficiency. This paper proposes a projection-based decomposition (PD), together with Cartesian genetic programming (CGP) as an EHW system namely PD-CGP, to design relatively large circuits. PD gradually decomposes a Boolean function by adaptively projecting it onto the property of variables, which makes the complexity and number of sub-logic blocks minimized. CGP employs an evolutionary strategy to search for the simple and compact solutions of these sub-blocks. The benchmark circuits from the MCNC library, \(n\)-parity circuits, and arithmetic circuits are used in the experiment to prove the ability of PD-CGP in solving scalability and efficiency. The results illustrate that PD-CGP is superior to 3SD-ES in evolving large circuits in terms of complexity reduction. PD-CGP also outperforms GDD+GA in evolving relatively large arithmetic circuits. Additionally, PD-CGP successfully evolves larger \(n\)-even-parity and arithmetic circuits, which have not done by other approaches.     

Minimal attribute reduction with rough set based on compactness discernibility information tree

Minimal attribute reduction plays an important role in rough set. Heuristic algorithms are proposed in literature reviews to get a minimal reduction and yet an unresolved issue is that many redundancy non-empty elements involving duplicates and supersets exist in discernibility matrix. To be able to eliminate the related redundancy and pointless elements, in this paper, we propose a compactness discernibility information tree (CDI-tree). The CDI-tree has the ability to map non-empty elements into one path and allow numerous non-empty elements share the same prefix, which is recognized as a compact structure to store non-empty elements in discernibility matrix. A complete algorithm is presented to address Pawlak reduction based on CDI-tree. The experiment results reveal that the proposed algorithm is more efficient than the benchmark algorithms to find out a minimal attribute reduction.     

Chaotic feature analysis and forecasting of Liujiang River runoff

Because most of runoff time series with limited amount of data reveal inherently nonlinear and stochastic characteristics and tend to show chaotic behavior, strategies based on chaotic analysis are popular methods to analyze them from real systems in nonlinear dynamics. Only one kind of predicted method for yearly rainfall-runoff forecasting cannot achieve perfect performance. Thus, a mixture strategy denoted by WT-PSR-GA-NN, which is composed of wavelet transform (WT), phase space reconstruction (PSR), neural network (NN) and genetic algorithm (GA), is presented in this paper. In the WT-PSR-GA-NN framework, the process to deal with time series gathered from Liujiang River runoff data is given as follows: (1) the runoff time series was first decomposed into low-frequency and high-frequency sub-series by wavelet transformation; (2) the two sub-series were separately and independently reconstructed into phase spaces; (3) the transformed time series in the reconstructed phase spaces were modeled by neural network, which is trained by genetic algorithm to avoid trapping into local minima; (4) the predicted results in low-frequency parts were combined with the ones of high-frequency parts, and reconstructed with wavelet inverse transformation, to form the future behavior of the runoff. Experiments show that WT-PSR-GA-NN is effective and its forecasting results are high in accuracy not only for the short-term yearly hydrological time series but also for the long-term one. The comparison results revealed that the overall forecasting performance of WT-PSR-GA-NN proposed by us is superior to other popularity methods for all the test cases. We can conclude that WT-PSR-GA-NN can not only increase the forecasted accuracy, but also its own competitiveness in efficiency, effectiveness and robustness.     

Extended minimum-squared error algorithm for robust face recognition via auxiliary mirror samples

The changes of face images with poses and polarized illuminations increase data uncertainty in face recognition. In fact, synthesized mirror samples can be recognized as representations of the left–right deflection of poses or illuminations of the face. Symmetrical face images generated from the original face images also provide more observations of the face which is useful for improving the accuracy of face recognition. In this paper, to the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that the well-known minimum squared error classification (MSEC) algorithm is used to perform face recognition on an extended face database using synthesized mirror training samples, which is titled as extended minimum squared error classification (EMSEC). By modifying the MSE classification rule, we append the mirror samples to the training set for gaining better classification performance. First, we merge original training samples and mirror samples synthesized from original training samples per subject as mixed training samples. Second, EMSEC algorithm exploits mixed training samples to obtain the projection matrix that can best transform the mixed training samples into predefined class labels. Third, the projection matrix is exploited to simultaneously obtain transform results of the test sample and its nearest neighbor from the mixed training sample set. Finally, we ultimately classify the test sample by combining the transform results of the test sample and the nearest neighbor. As an extension of MSEC, EMSEC reduces the uncertainty of the face observation by auxiliary mirror samples, so that it has better robustness classification performance than traditional MSEC. Experimental results on the ORL, GT, and FERET databases show that EMSEC has better generalization ability than traditional MSEC.     

Understanding governance,risk and compliance information systems (GRC IS): The experts view

Although Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) is an emerging field of study within the information systems (IS) academic community, the concept behind the acronym has to still be demystified and further investigated. The study investigates GRC systems in depth by (a) reviewing the literature on existing GRC studies, and (b) presenting a field study on views about GRC application by professional experts. The aim of this exploratory study is to understand the aspects and the nature of the GRC system following an enterprise systems approach. The result of this study is a framework of particular GRC characteristics that need to be taken into consideration when these systems are put in place. This framework includes specific areas such as: goals and objectives, purpose of the system, key stakeholders, methodology and requirements prior to implementation, critical success factors and problems/barriers. Further discussion about the issues, the concerns and the diverse views on GRC would assist in developing an agenda for the future research on the GRC field.     

Two CEGAR-based approaches for the safety verification of PLC-controlled plants

In this paper we address the safety analysis of chemical plants controlled by programmable logic controllers (PLCs). We consider a specification of the control program of the PLCs, extended with the specification of the dynamic plant behavior. The resulting hybrid models can be transformed to hybrid automata, for which advanced techniques for reachability analysis exist. However, the hybrid automata models are often too large to be analyzed. We propose two counterexample-guided abstraction refinement (CEGAR) approaches to keep the size of the hybrid models moderate.     

Standard goal programming with fuzzy hierarchies: a sequential approach

This paper proposes a pragmatic model for multi-objective decision-making processes involving clusters of objectives which have a decisional meaning for the decision maker (DM). We provide the DMs with a comfortable tool that allows them to express their preferences both by comparing criteria of the same cluster and via the comparison between the different clusters. In standard goal programming the importance of the goals is modeled by the introduction of preferential weights or/and the incorporation of pre-emptive priorities. However, in many cases the DM is not able to establish a precise preference structure. Even in the case of precise weights the solution does not match necessarily the relative weights or, in the case of precise pre-emptive priority, the result could be very restrictive. In order to overcome these drawbacks, in this paper the normalized unwanted deviations are interpreted in terms of achievement degrees of the goals and fuzzy relations are used to model the relative importance of the goals. Thus, we show how several methodologies from the fuzzy goal programming literature can be tailored for solving standard GP problems. We apply this new modeling to problems where there is a “natural” clustering between goals of the same class. We address this situation by solving two phases; in the first one each class is handled separately taking into account the hierarchy of their goals and, in the second phase, we integrate the results of the first phase and the imprecise hierarchy of the different classes. We formulate a new goal programming model called as sequential goal programming with fuzzy hierarchy model. Because many real situations involve decision making in this environment, our proposal can be a useful tool of broad application. A numerical example illustrates the methodology.