Providing an appropriate search space to solve the fatigue problem in interactive evolutionary computation

The user fatigue problem in interactive evolutionary computation (IEC) is a complex and interesting issue. If the IEC search space is created from the experience or knowledge of domain experts rather than from users values, it causes two potential problems which lead to fatigue problems in IEC: 1) inefficiency and 2) boredom. Therefore, we propose a customer values-based IEC model, solving the fatigue problem by avoiding the potential problems. A case study involving the design of mineral water bottles was used to verify the anti-fatigue capability of the users when using the proposed model. For comparison with the traditional domain knowledge-based model, we built two IEC systems, a customer values-based system and a traditional system, and conducted a user burden test and a system efficiency test over a two-week period. The results of both tests show that our proposed system performed better than the traditional system in designing mineral water bottles. Fang-Cheng Hsu, Ph.D.: He received his M.S. degree from Tamkang University, Taiwan, in 1985 and Ph.D. degree from Department of Information Management, National Central University, Taiwan, in 2000. He is an associate professor of Information Management at Aletheia University in Taiwan. Prior to this, he was on the faculty at Tamsui Oxford College. His current research interests include interactive evolutionary computation and evolutionary computation-based decision support systems. Peter Huang: He received his B.A. degree from Department of Information Management, Aletheia University, Taiwan, in 1997, and M.B.A. degree from Graduate Institute of Management Science, Aletheia University, Taiwan, in 2003. He is on staff at Information Technology Total Services and is a part-time lecturer at Aletheia University. His current research interests are decision analysis and interactive evolutionary computation.