Enhancing Mass Customization Manufacturing: Multiobjective Metaheuristic Algorithms for flow shop Production in Smart Industry

The current landscape of massive production industries is undergoing significant transformations driven by emerging customer trends and new smart manufacturing technologies. One such change is the imperative to implement mass customization, wherein products are tailored to individual customer specifications while still ensuring cost efficiency through large-scale production processes. These shifts can profoundly impact various facets of the industry. This study focuses on the necessary adaptations in shop-floor production planning. Specifically, it proposes the use of efficient evolutionary algorithms to tackle the flowshop with missing operations, considering different optimization objectives: makespan, weighted total tardiness, and total completion time. An extensive computational experimentation is conducted across a range of realistic instances, encompassing varying numbers of jobs, operations, and probabilities of missing operations. The findings demonstrate the competitiveness of the proposed approach and enable the identification of the most suitable evolutionary algorithms for addressing this problem. Additionally, the impact of the probability of missing operations on optimization objectives is discussed.

Evolutionary latent space search for driving human portrait generation

This article presents an evolutionary approach for synthetic human portraits generation based on the latent space exploration of a generative adversarial network. The idea is to produce different human face images very similar to a given target portrait. The approach applies StyleGAN2 for portrait generation and FaceNet for face similarity evaluation. The evolutionary search is based on exploring the real-coded latent space of StyleGAN2. The main results over both synthetic and real images indicate that the proposed approach generates accurate and diverse solutions, which represent realistic human portraits. The proposed research can contribute to improving the security of face recognition systems.

Exact and heuristic approaches for multi-objective garbage accumulation points location in real scenarios

Municipal solid waste management is a major challenge for nowadays urban societies, because it accounts for a large proportion of public budget and, when mishandled, it can lead to environmental and social problems. This work focuses on the problem of locating waste bins in an urban area, which is considered to have a strong influence in the overall efficiency of the reverse logistic chain. This article contributes with an exact multiobjective approach to solve the waste bin location in which the optimization criteria that are considered are: the accessibility to the system (as quality of service measure), the investment cost, and the required frequency of waste removal from the bins (as a proxy of the posterior routing costs). In this approach, different methods to obtain the objectives ideal and nadir values over the Pareto front are proposed and compared. Then, a family of heuristic methods based on the PageRank algorithm is proposed which aims to optimize the accessibility to the system, the amount of collected waste and the installation cost. The experimental evaluation was performed on real-world scenarios of the cities of Montevideo, Uruguay, and Bah\'ia Blanca, Argentina. The obtained results show the competitiveness of the proposed approaches for constructing a set of candidate solutions that considers the different trade-offs between the optimization criteria.

Parallel/distributed implementation of cellular training for generative adversarial neural networks

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are widely used to learn generative models. GANs consist of two networks, a generator and a discriminator, that apply adversarial learning to optimize their parameters. This article presents a parallel/distributed implementation of a cellular competitive coevolutionary method to train two populations of GANs. A distributed memory parallel implementation is proposed for execution in high performance/supercomputing centers. Efficient results are reported on addressing the generation of handwritten digits (MNIST dataset samples). Moreover, the proposed implementation is able to reduce the training times and scale properly when considering different grid sizes for training.

Soft computing methods for multiobjective location of garbage accumulation points in smart cities

This article describes the application of soft computing methods for solving the problem of locating garbage accumulation points in urban scenarios. This is a relevant problem in modern smart cities, in order to reduce negative environmental and social impacts in the waste management process, and also to optimize the available budget from the city administration to install waste bins. A specific problem model is presented, which accounts for reducing the investment costs, enhance the number of citizens served by the installed bins, and the accessibility to the system. A family of single- and multi-objective heuristics based on the PageRank method and two mutiobjective evolutionary algorithms are proposed. Experimental evaluation performed on real scenarios on the cities of Montevideo (Uruguay) and Bahia Blanca (Argentina) demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. The methods allow computing plannings with different trade-off between the problem objectives. The computed results improve over the current planning in Montevideo and provide a reasonable budget cost and quality of service for Bahia Blanca.