The Use of Simulation in Genetic Algorithms

A departmental talk by John Fowler

About the speaker

JOHN FOWLER is the Motorola Professor and former Chair of the Supply Chain Management department at ASU. His research interests include discrete event simulation, deterministic scheduling, and multi-criteria decision making. He has published over 125 journal articles and over 100 conference papers. He was the Program Chair for the 2002 and 2008 Industrial Engineering Research Conferences and the 2008 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC). He founding Editor-in-Chief for of IIE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering and continues as the Healthcare Operations Management department editor. He is also an Editor of theJournal of Simulation and Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE), served as the IISE Vice President for Continuing Education, is a former INFORMS Vice President, and served on the WSC Board of Directors from 2005-2016.

About the talk

In this talk, we discuss two research efforts that used discrete event simulation as a solution evaluator within a genetic algorithm. The first effort was a study  focused on scheduling patients’ surgeries in an outpatient procedure clinic. The second involved evaluating remote diagnostic investment decisions for semiconductor equipment suppliers.  While the goal in the second study was to determine the best long-term solution, we made extensive use of short simulations in the early iterations of the genetic algorithm.