Surrogate-Assisted Multi-Objective Parameter Optimization for Production Planning Systems

Efficient global optimization is, even after over two decades of research, still considered as one of the best approaches to surrogate-assisted optimization. In this paper, material requirements planning parameters are optimized and two different versions of EGO, implemented as optimization networks in HeuristicLab, are applied and compared. The first version resembles a more standardized version of EGO, where all steps of the algorithm, i.e. expensive evaluation, model building and optimizing expected improvement, are executed synchronously in sequential order. The second version differs in two aspects: (i) instead of a single objective, two objectives are optimized and (ii) all steps of the algorithm are executed asynchronously. The latter leads to faster algorithm execution, since model building and solution evaluations can be done in parallel and do not block each other. Comparisons are done in terms of achieved solution quality and consumed runtime. The results show that the multi-objective, asynchronous optimization network can compete with the single-objective, synchronous version and outperforms the latter in terms of runtime.