This thesis investigates the use of problem-specific knowledge to enhance a genetic algorithm approach to multiple-choice optimisation problems. It shows that such information can significantly enhance performance, but that the choice of information and the way it is included are important...

PRECON S.A is a manufacturing company dedicated to produce prefabricated concrete parts to several industries as rail transportation and agricultural industries.Recently, PRECON signed a contract with RENFE, the Spanish National Rail Transportation Company to manufacture pre-stressed concrete...

Production scheduling dictates highly constrained mathematical models with complex and often contradicting objectives. Evolutionary algorithms can be formulated almost independently of the detailed shaping of the problems under consideration. As one would expect, a weak formulation of the...

Combinatorial optimization problems are usually NP-hard and the solution space of them is very large. Therefore the set of feasible solutions cannot be evaluated one by one. Artificial Bee Colony (ABC), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Genetic Algorithms (GA) are metaheuristic techniques...