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Purpose: Although digitalization in the workplace is burgeoning, tools are needed to facilitate personalized learning in informal learning settings. Existing knowledge recommendation techniques do not account for dynamic and task-oriented user preferences. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new design of a knowledge recommender system (RS) to fill this research gap and provide guidance for practitioners on how to enhance the effectiveness of workplace learning. Design/methodology/approach: This study employs the design science research approach. A novel hybrid knowledge recommendation technique is proposed. An experiment was carried out in a case company to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system design. Quantitative data were collected to investigate the influence of personalized knowledge service on users' learning attitude. Findings: The proposed personalized knowledge RS obtained satisfactory user feedback. The results also show that providing personalized knowledge service can positively influence users' perceived usefulness of learning. Practical implications: This research highlights the importance of providing digital support for workplace learners. The proposed new knowledge recommendation technique would be useful for practitioners and developers to harness information technology to facilitate workplace learning and effect organization learning strategies. Originality/value: This study expands the scope of research on RS and workplace learning. This research also draws scholarly attention to the effective utilization of digital techniques, such as a RS, to support user decision making in the workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-objective optimization is an interesting and hot topic in the literature involving the conflicting objectives to be solved simultaneously. In this study, a new multiple optimization method based on a discrete bacterial algorithm is developed to address the multi-objective economic-environmental dispatch problem with non-linear, non-convex, and complexity constraints. In the proposed multi-objective bacterial based algorithm, the existence of bacteria complies with a fitness survival mechanism, in which a health sorting approach is operated to control the chances of reproduction as well as elimination. The performances of bacteria have been recorded and sorted for health evaluation, which can help to group the individuals according to their search capability and improve the overall quality of the population. To speed up the convergence rate and avoid local minima to some extent, a comprehensive learning strategy is embedded to enable the communication exchanges between the bacteria and external archive. The standard IEEE 30-bus, 6-generator test system is adopted to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method by making the comparison with the other multiple bacterial-based algorithms as well as six other well developed evolutionary algorithms. The effectiveness of the propose method is well validated in experiments by providing similar or superior solutions to environmental/economic power dispatch issues considering the various constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a variant of the bacterial foraging optimization (BFO) algorithm with time-varying chemotaxis step length and comprehensive learning strategy which we call adaptive comprehensive learning bacterial foraging optimization (ALCBFO). An adaptive non-linearly decreasing modulation model is used to keep a well balance between the exploration and exploitation of the proposed algorithm. The comprehensive learning mechanism maintains the diversity of the bacterial population and thus alleviates the premature convergence. Compared with the classical GA, PSO, the original BFO and two improved BFO (BFO-LDC and BFO-NDC) algorithm, the proposed ACLBFO shows significantly better performance in solving multimodal problems. We also assess the performance of the ACLBFO method on vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). Compared with three other BFO algorithms, the proposed algorithm is superior and confirms its potential to solve vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates a new bacterial colony-based feature selection algorithm to improve the classification accuracy of customers for personalized products recommendation. An attribute learning strategy is developed in this study to update the feature related population. Specifically, the features can be weighted according to their historic contributions to both the individual- and group-based subsets. Additionally, the frequency of appearance is also recorded for the feature candidates to improve the diversity of feature distribution and avoid the over-fitting. Based on the weight-based feature indexes and frequency of appearance records, the performance of feature subsets are enhanced by replacing the features being repeatedly appeared in a same vector. To explore the feasibility of the proposed method for the missing feature problems, the objective of the optimization is to minimize the classification error using the acceptable number of features. K-Nearest Neighbor is employed as the learning technique to cooperate with the proposed feature selection method. The effectiveness of the proposed feature selection method is demonstrated by performing test on the datasets from UCI machine learning repository and real-world data from Amazon customer reviews of products. Compared with other seven feature selections methods, the proposed feature selection algorithm outperforms the other algorithms by achieving higher classification accuracy rate using smaller features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feature selection plays an important role in data preprocessing. The aim of feature selection is to recognize and remove redundant or irrelevant features. The key issue is to use as few features as possible to achieve the lowest classification error rate. This paper formulates feature selection as a multi-objective problem. In order to address feature selection problem, this paper uses the multi-objective bacterial foraging optimization algorithm to select the feature subsets and k-nearest neighbor algorithm as the evaluation algorithm. The wheel roulette mechanism is further introduced to remove duplicated features. Four information exchange mechanisms are integrated into the bacteria-inspired algorithm to avoid the individuals getting trapped into the local optima so as to achieve better results in solving high-dimensional feature selection problem. On six small datasets and ten high-dimensional datasets, comparative experiments with different conventional wrapper methods and several evolutionary algorithms demonstrate the superiority of the proposed bacteria-inspired based feature selection method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cell formation plays an important role in the design of cellular manufacturing systems. Among many methods utilized to solve the cell formation problem, the similarity coefficient method is the most widely used owing to its high flexibility and low computational requirement. However, generalized similarity coefficients ignore material flow, which is closely related to operation sequence and repeated operations. Moreover, most similarity coefficient-based clustering algorithms focus on the number of inter-cell movements but disregard distinction of the movement effort. To overcome these limitations, this study improves the generalized similarity coefficient method to form part families. In addition, a new clustering algorithm is presented to assign machines to cells with minimum intensity of material inter-cell movement, which depends on the frequency, production volume and difficulty level of inter-cell movement. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has superior sensitivity and effectiveness for solving the cell formation problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we focus on two scheduling problems in container terminal: (i) the Yard Truck Scheduling Problem (YTSP) which assigns a fleet of trucks to transport containers between the QCs and the storage yard to minimize the makespan, (ii) the integrated Yard Truck Scheduling Problem and Storage Allocation Problem (YTS–SAP) which extends the first problem to consider storage allocation strategy for discharging containers. Its object is to minimize the total delay for all jobs. The second model is improved to consider the truck ready time. Due to the computational intractability, two recently developed solution methods, based on swarm intelligence technique, are developed for problem solution, namely, particle swarm optimization (PSO) and bacterial colony optimization (BCO). As these two algorithms are originally designed for continuous optimization problems, we proposed a particular mapping method to implement them for YTSP and YTS–SAP, both of which are discrete optimization problems. Through comparing the PSO algorithms and BCO algorithm with GA by an experiment conducted on different scale instances, we can draw a conclusion that LPSO perform best in YTSP while BCO perform best in YTS–SAP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a multi-objective integrated container terminal scheduling problem considering three key components: berth allocation, quay cranes assignment and containers transportation in port operation process. In the suggested problem, one of the objectives is to shorten service time of ships with by coordinating of quay cranes, and the other is to reduce operating costs of quay cranes and yard trucks. Then, a Multi-objective Bacterial Colony Optimization algorithm (MOBCO) incorporating concepts of multi-swarm, topology, personal best and global best, named Multi-objective BCO with ring topology (MORBCO), is designed to handle the resulting problem. The extension of standard MOBCO to the MORBCO involves the addition of three specialized strategies: global chemotaxis operation, elite reproduction strategy and personal best archive with neighborhood communication mechanism. In order to test the performance of the MORBCO, benchmark tests are performed and compared with traditional MOBCO and three other well-known multi-objective algorithms first. The computational results indicate that the proposed algorithm can outperform other rivals and efficiently solve a variety of multi-objective problems in most of cases. Subsequently, MORBCO and two best performing algorithms from the previous test are applied to three instances generated by the proposed model. Judging by quality and diversity of obtained non-dominant solutions, we find that MORBCO has superior performance, especially for large instances of the container terminal problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A population-based clustering technique, which attempts to integrate different particle swarm optimizers (PSOs) with the famous k-means algorithm, is proposed. More specifically, six existing extensively studied PSOs, which have shown promising performance for continuous optimization, are hybridized separately with Lloyd's k-means algorithm, leading to six PSO-based clustering methods. These PSO-based approaches use different social communications among neighbors to make some particles escape from local optima to enhance exploration, while k-means is utilized to refine the partitioning results for accelerating convergence. Comparative experiments on 12 synthetic and real-life datasets show that the proposed population-based clustering technique can obtain better and more stable solutions than five individual-based counterparts in most cases. Further, the effects of four different population topologies, three kinds of parameter settings, and two types of initialization methods on the clustering performance are empirically investigated. Moreover, seven boundary handling strategies for PSOs are firstly summarized. Finally, some unexpected conclusions are drawn from the experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper describes a novel Bacterial Foraging Optimization (BFO) approach to multi-objective optimization, called Multi-objective Bacterial Foraging Optimization (MBFO). The objectives in the Multi-objective Bacterial Foraging Optimization are maintained by a fitness survive mechanism. Bacteria with the smaller health values have the better chance to survive. Meanwhile, the main goal of multi-objective optimization problems is to obtain a superior non-dominated front which is closed to the true Pareto front. With identification of such features, the idea of integration between health sorting approach and pareto dominance mechanism are developed to search for Pareto-optimal set of problems. Moreover, strategy keeping a certain unfeasible border solutions based on a given probability is considered to improve the diversity of individuals. In addition, two different performance metrics: Diversity and Generational Distance are introduced as well to evaluate multi-objective optimization problems. Compared to two other multi-objective optimization evolutionary algorithms MOPSO and NSGA-II, simulation results show that in most cases, the proposed MBFO is able to find a much better spread of solutions and convergence to the true Pareto-optimal front faster. It suggests that MBFO is very promising in dealing with ordinary multi-objective optimization problems. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]