Special Issue Adaptive Computing In Design And Manufacture

Adaptive Computing in Design and Manufacture VI

The Adaptive Computing in Design and Manufacture conference series has become a well-established, largely application-oriented meeting recognised by several UK Engineering Institutions and the International Society of Genetic and Evolutionary Computing. The main theme of the series relates to the integration of evolutionary and adaptive computing technologies with design and manufacturing processes whilst also taking into account complementary advanced computing technologies. Evolutionary and adaptive computing techniques continue to increase their penetration of industrial and commercial practice as awareness of their powerful search, exploration and optimisation capabilities becomes ever more prevalent, and increasing desk-top computational capability renders stochastic population-based search a far more viable proposition. There has been a significant increase in the development and integration of commercial software tools utilising adaptive computing technologies and the emergence of related commercial research and consultancy organisations supporting the introduction of best practice in terms of industrial utilisation. The book is comprised of selected papers that cover a diverse set of industrial application areas including engineering design and design environments and manufacturing process design, scheduling and control. Various aspects of search, exploration and optimisation are investigated in the context of integration with industrial processes including multi-objective and constraint satisfaction, development and utilization of meta-models, algorithm and strategy development and human-centric evolutionary approaches. The role of agent-based and neural net technologies in terms of supporting search processes and providing an alternative simulation environment is also explored. This collection of papers will be of particular interest to both industrial researchers and practitioners in addition to the academic research communities across engineering, operational research and computer science.

Special Issue: Adaptive Computing in Design and Manufacture

Evolutionary and Adaptive Computing in Engineering Design

Prior to the early 1990s the term 'evolutionary computing' (EC) would have meant little to most practising engineers unless they had a particular interest in emerging computing technologies or were part of an organisation with significant in-house research activities. It was around this time that the first tentative utilisation of relatively simple evolutionary algorithms within engineering design began to emerge in the UK The potential was rapidly recognised especially within the aerospace sector with both Rolls Royce and British Aerospace taking a serious interest while in the USA General Electric had already developed a suite of optimisation software which included evolutionary and adaptiv,e search algorithms. Considering that the technologies were already twenty-plus years old at this point the long gestation period is perhaps indicative of the problems associated with their real-world implementation. Engineering application was evident as early as the mid-sixties when the founders of the various techniques achieved some success with computing resources that had difficulty coping with the population-based search characteristics of the evolutionary algorithms. Unlike more conventional, deterministic optimisation procedures, evolutionary algorithms search from a population of possible solutions which evolve over many generations. This largely stochastic process demands serious computing capability especially where objective functions involve complex iterative mathematical procedures.