An improved society of hill-climbers and its application on batch process scheduling

Society of Hill-Climbers (SOHC) is a kind of powerful evolutionary optimization algorithm for a large range of problems. But the performance of the algorithm is sensitive to the mutation rate, which must be determined by the user based on the problem. In this study, the performance of SOHC with different mutation rate was evaluated on a series of large numerical problems and mutation rates robust for all the problems tested were identified. Then the algorithm was applied to an important type of optimization problem, the scheduling problem of batch process. The results show that SOHC is a very versatile and powerful method for solving the batch process scheduling problems and is superior to the widely used simulated annealing.