DOUBLE DUTY GENETIC ALGORITHMS FOR ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN AND GENETIC ALGORITHMS INSPIRED BY.pdfVIP

DOUBLE DUTY: GENETIC ALGORITHMS FOR ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN AND GENETIC ALGORITHMS INSPIRED BY ORGANIZATIONAL THEORY Tian-Li Yu, Ali A. Yassine, David E. Goldberg University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of General Engineering, Urbana, IL 61801 Abstract Modularity is widely used in system analysis and design such as complex engineering products and their organization. Also, modularity is the key to solve optimization problems efficiently via problem decomposition. We first discover modularity in a system, and then leverage this knowledge to improve the performance of the system. In this chapter, we tackle both problems with the alliance of organizational theory and evolutionary computation. First, we cluster the dependency structure matrix (DSM) of a system using a simple genetic algorithm (GA) and an information theoretic based metric. Then we design a better GA through the decomposition of the optimization problem using the proposed DSM clustering method. 1 INTRODUCTION Modularity is ubiquitous (Schilling, 2002). The concept can be found in and applied to many disciplines: biology (Hartwell et al., 1999; Andrews, 1998), psychology (Fodor, 1996), social networks (Newman Girvan, 2004; Guimerà et al., 2003), engineering design (Ishii Yang 2003; Fixson, 2003), engineering optimization (Altus et al., 1996), and software development (Sullivan et al., 2001), to name a few. Such modular structure in many of these natural and man-made complex systems is believed to improve the functionality, performance, and robustness of these systems (Alon, 2003; Baldwin Clark,