abstract = "Several practical problems in industry are difficult
to optimize, both in terms of scalability and
representation. Heuristics designed by domain experts
are frequently applied to such problems. However,
designing optimized heuristics can be a non-trivial
task. One such difficult problem is the Facility Layout
Problem (FLP) which is concerned with the allocation of
activities to space. This paper is concerned with the
block layout problem, where the activities require a
fixed size and shape (modules). This problem is
commonly divided into two sub problems; one of creating
an initial feasible layout and one of improving the
layout by interchanging the location of activities. We
investigate how to extract novel heuristics for the FLP
by applying an approach called Cooperative
Coevolutionary Gene Expression Programming (CCGEP). By
taking advantage of the natural problem decomposition,
one species evolves heuristics for pre-scheduling, and
another for allocating the activities onto the plant.
An experimental, comparative approach investigates
various features of the CCGEP approach. The results
show that the evolved heuristics converge to suboptimal
solutions as the problem size grows. However,
coevolution has a positive effect on optimization of
single problem instances. Expensive fitness evaluations
may be limited by evolving generalized heuristics
applicable to unseen fitness cases of arbitrary
sizes.",
notes = "GECCO-2009 A joint meeting of the eighteenth
international conference on genetic algorithms
(ICGA-2009) and the fourteenth annual genetic
programming conference (GP-2009).